y atmosphere of the heroic novels. Their
extraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit of
the age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone
of Greek romance. No book had been read in France with greater avidity
than the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel _Heliodorus_;
and in the _Polexandres_ and _Clelies_ we see what this Greek spirit
of romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of Louis
XIV.

The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, for
the whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historians
of literature. It has been asserted that they were not read in England
until after the Restoration. Nothing is further from the truth.
Charles I. read _Cassandra_ in prison, while we find Dorothy Osborne,
in her exquisite letters to Sir William Temple, assiduously studying
one heroic novel after another through the central years of Cromwell's
rule. She reads _Le Grand Cyrus_ while she has the ague; she desires
Temple to tell her "which _amant_ you have most compassion for, when
you have read what each one says for himself." She and the King read
them in the original, but soon there arrived English translations
and imitations. These began to appear a good deal sooner than
bibliographers have been prepared to admit. Of the _Astree_ of
D'Urfe--which, however, is properly a link between the _Arcadia_ of
Sidney and the genuine heroic novel--there was an English version
as early as 1620. But, of the real thing, the first importation was
_Polexandre_, in 1647, followed by _Cassandra_ and _Ibrahim_ in 1652,
_Artamenes_ in 1653, _Cleopatra_ in 1654-8, and _Clelie_ in 1655, all,
it will be observed, published in England before the close of the
Commonwealth.

Dorothy Osborne, who had studied the French originals, turned up her
nose at these translations. She says that they were "so disguised
that I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly knew them." They had,
moreover, changed their form. In France they had come out in an
infinite number of small, manageable tomes. For instance, Calprenede
published his _Cleopatre_ in twenty-three volumes; but the English
_Cleopatra_ is all contained in one monstrous elephant folio.
_Artamenes_, the English translation of _Le Grand Cyrus_, is worse
still, for it is comprised in five such folios. Many of the originals
were translated over and over again, so popular were they; and as the
heroic novels of any