And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest sanction.

PHARAMOND

PHARAMOND; or, The History of France.  A New Romance.  In four parts.  Written originally in French, by the Author of Cassandra and Cleopatra:  and now elegantly rendered into English.  London:  Printed by Ja:  Cottrell for Samuel Speed, at the Rain-Bow in Fleetstreet, near the Inner Temple-Gate. (Folio.) 1662.

There is no better instance of the fact that books will not live by good works alone than is offered by the utterly neglected heroic novels of the seventeenth century.  At the opening of the reign of Louis XIV. in France, several writers, in the general dearth of prose fiction, began to supply the public in Paris with a series of long romances, which for at least a generation absorbed the attention of the ladies and reigned unopposed in every boudoir.  I wonder whether my lady readers have ever attempted to realise how their sisters of two hundred years ago spent their time?  In an English country-house of 1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no lawn tennis or croquet, no afternoon-teas or glee-concerts, no mothers’ meetings or zenana missions, no free social intercourse with neighbours, none of the thousand and one agreeable diversions with which the life of a modern girl is diversified.  On the other hand, the ladies of the house had their needlework to attend to, they had to “stitch in a clout,” as it was called; they had to attend to the duties of a housekeeper, and, when the sun shone, they tended the garden.  Perhaps they rode or drove, in a stately fashion.  But through long hours they sat over their embroidery frames or mended the solemn old tapestries which lined their walls, and during these sedate performances they required a long-winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might be read aloud by turns.  The heroic novel, as provided by Gombreville, Calprenede, and Mlle. de Scudery supplied this want to perfection.

The sentiments in these novels were of the most elevated class, and tedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almost more than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion.  Madame de Sevigne herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessed herself to be a fly in the spider’s web of their attractions.  “The beauty of the sentiments,” she writes, “the violence of the passions, the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of their redoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a little girl.”  In these modern days of success, we may still start to learn that the Parisian publisher of Le Grand Cyrus made 100,000 crowns by that work, from the appearance of its first volume in 1649 to its close in 1653.  The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame de Sevigne were those which appealed most directly to public feeling in France.  There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalric passions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of all kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience.  When La Rochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines which may be thus translated: