part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the Amadis pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of the first.) On the whole, Parismus, though it has few pretensions to elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite the best of our bunch in this kind.  It is, in general conception, pure Amadis of the later and slightly degraded type.  Laurana, the heroine (of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a “jolly gentleman”) is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana—­but separations and difficulties duly follow in “desolate isles” and the like.  And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the “contrast of friends,” founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain Pollipus—­“a man of his hands” if ever there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her.  There is plenty of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500 very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call “jaw” than is usual in the class.  If it were not for the black letter (which is trying to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than Parismus for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of literary and professional work. The Famous History of Montelion, the Knight of the Oracle (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more clearly:  but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of the century.  I should imagine that in extenso it was a good deal duller than Parismus.  And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is—­a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed “conjuror’s supernatural.”  If anybody cannot read Amadis itself, he certainly will not read Parismus:  and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original—­perhaps not even everybody who can manage Palmerin—­could put up with Ford’s copy.  I can take this Ford as I find him:  but I am not sure that I would go much lower.

    [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
    of these things in the late seventeenth century was W. 
    Thackeray.