French
authors acceptable, grossness was added to Moliere, bombast to Racine;
even Otway, when translating "Berenice," transformed Racine's "Titus"
into a bully of romance who, in order to assuage his grief, goes to
overrun "the Universe" and make "the worlds" as wretched as he is.[353]
Madame de la Fayette had shown how it was possible to copy from life, in
a novel, true heroism and true tenderness without exaggeration; her
exquisite masterpiece was translated of course as was everything then
that was French; but oblivion soon gathered round the "Princess of
Cleve," and the only proof we have that it did not pass unnoticed is a
clumsy play by Lee, in which this best of old French novels is
mercilessly caricatured.[354] There was no attempt to imitate the
Comtesse's pure and perfect style and high train of thought.

IV.

Reaction against the heroical romances did not wait, however, till the
eighteenth century to assert itself in England; it set in early and very
amusingly: but it remained powerless. As the evil had chiefly come from
France, so did the remedy; but the remedy in France proved sufficient
for a cure. In that country at all times the tale had flourished, and at
all times in the tale, to the detriment of chivalry and heroism, writers
had prided themselves on seeking mere truth. Thus, in the charming
preface of the Reine de Navarre's "Heptameron," Dame Parlamente
establishes the theory of these narratives, and relates how, at the
court, it had been decided to write a series of them, but to exclude
from the number of their authors "those who should have studied and be
men of letters; for Monseigneur the Dauphin did not wish their artifice
to be introduced into them, and was also afraid lest the beauty of
rhetoric should in some place injure the truth of the tale."

In the seventeenth century, the tradition of the old story-tellers is
carried on in France in more developed writings, in actual novels, such
as the "Baron de Foeneste" of D'Aubigne, 1617; the "Francion" of Charles
Sorel, 1622(?); the "Berger extravagant" of the same, 1628; the "Roman
Comique" of Scarron, 1651; the "Roman bourgeois" of Furetiere, 1666, and
many others. Scarron, who had travestied Virgil, was not the man to
spare La Calprenede, and he does not lose his opportunity. "I cannot
exactly tell you," he writes of one of his characters, "whether he had
sup'd that night, or went to bed empty, as some Romance-mongers use to
do, who regula