[Footnote 85:  Act ii, sc. 1.]

[Footnote 86:  “Literature of Europe,” vol. 4, chap. 6, sec. 2-47.]

II

With the pensions and fashions which were sent across the Channel from the court of Louis XIV, came a curious species of fiction which had a temporary vogue in England.  Gomberville, Scuderi, and Calprenede had created the school of Heroic Romance by the publication of those monumental works which the French not inaptly termed “les romans de longue haleine.”  This was the bulky but enervated descendant of chivalric and pastoral romance.  The tales of chivalry and of pastoral life had their raison d’etre.  The feudal knighthood found in the tournaments, in the adventures of knight-errantry, and in the supernatural agencies which filled their volumes of romance, the reflection of their own aspirations and beliefs.  They admired in the ideal characters of Charlemagne and Arthur the qualities most valued among themselves.  Martial glory was to them the chief object of life; love was simply the reward of valor.  The pastoral romance followed in less warlike times.  Its subject was love; and that passion was usually described amidst humble and peaceful shepherds, where its strength and charm could develop more fully than amidst scenes of war and tumult.  Both the chivalric and the pastoral romance were the embodiment of ideals which in turn represented contemporary tastes.  But heroic romance, although it shared some of the characteristics of its predecessors, had not the same claim to interest.  It was unnatural and artificial, rather than ideal.  It imitated the martial character of the tales of chivalry, but subordinated that character to love.  It imitated the devoted strain of adoration which ran through the fanciful phrases of pastoral fiction; but that artificial passion which seemed appropriate to ideal shepherds tuning their pipes under a perpetual sunshine, became absurd when applied to Greek or Carthaginian soldiers.

Gomberville’s “Polexander,” complete-in six thousand pages, and Calprenede’s “Cassandra,” “the fam’d romance,” are now before me.  Greeks, Romans, Turks, Parthians, Scythians, Babylonians are mingled together in a truly heroic structure of absurdity and anachronism.  Artaxerxes appears on one page, the queen of the Amazons on the next, then the king of Lacedaemon, Alexander the Great, even a prince of Mexico, and comparatively private persons beyond computation.  This crowd of names represent personages who imitate the deeds of chivalry, and converse in the affected style of the French court, while their ancient bosoms are distracted by a pure, all-absorbing, and never-dying love as foreign to their nature as to that of the readers of heroic romance.  That this species of fiction should have met with any success, is largely due to the circumstance, that under the disguise of Greek warriors or Parthian princesses, there were really described contemporary beauties and courtiers, who fondly believed that they had attained, through the genius of Calprenede and Scuderi, an enviable immortality.  Unhappily for them, the characters of heroic romance have found in that endless desert of phraseology at once their birthplace and their tomb.