degrees
it dropped off; but it was succeeded by a somewhat similar habit of
giving the subsequent history of personages introduced--a thing which,
though Scott satirised it in Mrs. Martha Buskbody's insistence on
information about the later history of Guse Gibbie,[196] by no means
ceased with his time. Both were, in fact, part of the general refusal to
accept the conditions of ordinary life. If "tout _passe_" is an
exaggeration, it is an exaggeration of the truth: and in fiction, as in
fact, the minor shapes must dissolve as well as arise without too much
fuss being made about them.[197]

[Sidenote: _Almahide._]

_Almahide_ is, I think, more readable than _Ibrahim_; but the _English_
reader must disabuse himself of the idea (if he entertains it) that he
will find much of the original of _The Conquest of Granada_. The book
does, indeed, open like the play, with the faction-fights of
Abencerrages and Zegrys, and it ends with Boabdelin's jealousy of his
wife Almahide, while a few of the other names in both are identical. But
_Almahide_ contains nothing, or hardly anything, of the character of
Almanzor, and Dryden has not attempted to touch a hundredth part of the
copious matter of the French novel, the early history of Almahide, the
usual immense digressions and side-_histoires_, the descriptions (which,
as in _Ibrahim_, play, I think, a larger relative part than in the
_Cyrus_), and what not.

[Sidenote: _Clelie._]

[Sidenote: Perhaps the liveliest of the set.]

Copious as these are, however, in both books, they do not fill them out
to anything like the length of the _Cyrus_ itself, or of its rival in
size, and perhaps superior in attraction, the _Clelie_. I do not plead
guilty to inconsistency or change of opinion in this "perhaps" when it
is compared with the very much larger space given to the earlier novel.
_Le Grand Cyrus_ has been estated too firmly, as the type and
representative of the whole class, to be dislodged, and there is, as we
shall see presently, a good deal of repetition from it in _Clelie_
itself. But this latter is the more amusing book of the two; it is,
though equally or nearly as big, less labyrinthine; there is somewhat
livelier movement in it, and at the same time this is contrasted with a
set or series of interludes of love-casuistry, which are better, I
think, than anything of the kind in the _Cyrus_.[198] The most famous
feature of these is, of course, the well-known but constantly misnam