pt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the
novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and
the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the
genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
and pedantic moralisation; and in the _Gesta Romanorum_, the most
popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and
mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'

The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh