At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediaeval variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.  Sidney’s attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it stands, and is certainly known not to have been revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in English.  For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind.  The unconscionable amount of talk and of writing “about it and about it” which Euphues and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as prominent in the Arcadia:  and this talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel reader’s demands.  Moreover, though there really is a plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be more disengaged from their framework—­that they should be brought into higher relief, should stand out more than is the case.  Yet further, the pure character-interest is small—­is almost nonexistent:  and the rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the Arcadia, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly’s, is practically only a whelp of the same litter.  Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too.  But it is bad even for pure romance purposes:  and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the novel.  To the actual successors of the Arcadia in English we shall come presently.

[1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the Arcadia is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming verse-insets.  But, as a novel, it cannot count these.

The Unfortunate Traveller is of much less importance than the other two.  It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of its invention or improvement of the fable of “Surrey and Geraldine”; more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of historical material—­the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders—­into something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the premonished) of the great and long missed