novel we must place a collection of tales
known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries.
These are imaginative and delightful stories of ideal love and marvelous
adventure,[214] which profoundly affected romance writing for the next
thousand years. A second group of predecessors is found in the Italian and
Spanish pastoral romances, which were inspired by the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.
These were extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
their influence is seen later in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which is the best of
this type in English.

The third and most influential group of predecessors of the novel is made
up of the romances of chivalry, such as are found in Malory's _Morte
d'Arthur_. It is noticeable, in reading these beautiful old romances in
different languages, that each nation changes them somewhat, so as to make
them more expressive of national traits and ideals. In a word, the old
romance tends inevitably towards realism, especially in England, where the
excessive imagination is curbed and the heroes become more human. In
Malory, in the unknown author of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, and
especially in Chaucer, we see the effect of the practical English mind in
giving these old romances a more natural setting, and in making the heroes
suggest, though faintly, the men and women of their own day. The
_Canterbury Tales_, with their story interest and their characters
delightfully true to nature, have in them the suggestion, at least, of a
connected story whose chief aim is to reflect life as it is.

In the Elizabethan Age the idea of the novel grows more definite. In
Sidney's _Arcadia_ (1580), a romance of chivalry, the pastoral setting at
least is generally true to nature; our credulity is not taxed, as in the
old romances, by the continual appearance of magic or miracles; and the
characters, though idealized till they become tiresome, occasionally give
the impression of being real men and women. In Bacon's _The New Atlantis_
(1627) we have the story of the discovery by mariners of an unknown
country, inhabited by a superior race of men, more civilized than
ourselves,--an idea which had been used by More in his _Utopia_ in 1516.
These two books are neither romances nor novels, in the strict sense, but
studies of social institutions. They use the connected story as a means of
teaching moral lessons, and of bringing about needed reforms; and this
valuable suggestion h