To win that wonder of the world,
       A smile from her bright eyes,
  I fought my King, and would have hurled
       The gods out of their skies,

he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic novels.  Their extraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit of the age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone of Greek romance.  No book had been read in France with greater avidity than the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel Heliodorus; and in the Polexandres and Clelies we see what this Greek spirit of romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of Louis XIV.

The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, for the whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historians of literature.  It has been asserted that they were not read in England until after the Restoration.  Nothing is further from the truth.  Charles I. read Cassandra in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne, in her exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously studying one heroic novel after another through the central years of Cromwell’s rule.  She reads Le Grand Cyrus while she has the ague; she desires Temple to tell her “which amant you have most compassion for, when you have read what each one says for himself.”  She and the King read them in the original, but soon there arrived English translations and imitations.  These began to appear a good deal sooner than bibliographers have been prepared to admit.  Of the Astree of D’Urfe—­which, however, is properly a link between the Arcadia of Sidney and the genuine heroic novel—­there was an English version as early as 1620.  But, of the real thing, the first importation was Polexandre, in 1647, followed by Cassandra and Ibrahim in 1652, Artamenes in 1653, Cleopatra in 1654-8, and Clelie in 1655, all, it will be observed, published in England before the close of the Commonwealth.

Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French originals, turned up her nose at these translations.  She says that they were “so disguised that I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them.”  They had, moreover, changed their form.  In France they had come out in an infinite number of small, manageable tomes.  For instance, Calprenede published his Cleopatre in twenty-three volumes; but the English Cleopatra is all contained in one monstrous elephant folio. Artamenes, the English translation of Le Grand Cyrus, is worse still, for it is comprised in five such folios.  Many of the originals were translated over and over again, so popular were they; and as the heroic novels of any eminence in France were limited in number, it would be easy, by patiently hunting the translations up in old libraries, to make a pretty complete list of them.  The principal heroic novels were eight in all; of these there is but one, the Almahide of Mile, de Scudery, which we have not already mentioned, and the original publication of the whole school is confined within less than thirty years.