In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native models:  and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of influence. The Arcadia and Euphues, the former continuously, the latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part of which the vogue of Amadis and its successors, as Englished by Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued.  The Greek romances also had much to do with the matter:  for the Elizabethan translators had introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good deal of attention to Greek.  Then, when that century itself was on its way, the pastoral romance of D’Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scudery productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and something of a new turn.  The actual translations of French and Spanish romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense bulk and doubtless excited imitation:  but we cannot possibly deal with them here.  A bare list would fill a chapter.  But some work of more or less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a little individual notice:  and some general characterisation may be added.

It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader that the general characteristics of these various sources were “harlequin” in their diversity of apparent colour.  The Amadis romances and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as Arthur of Little Britain, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the “conjuror’s supernatural”—­witches and giants and magic black and white.  The Spanish “picaresque” story was pretty real but even less decent:  and its French imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale, which clung to fabliau ways in this respect) imitated it here also.  The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most scrupulous propriety in language and situation:  but aggravated the Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated “key” interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.

Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published Parismus, Prince of Bohemia, as early as 1598.  In less than a hundred years (1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth century. (It is sometimes called Parismus and Parismenus:  the second