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
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 oth