s eaux de la Sennatele avec son
frere Dinazel...." The fact that the presupposed gentle reader knows
nothing of the persons or the places mentioned is supposed to arouse in
him an inextinguishable desire to find out. That he should be at once
gratified is, of course, unthinkable. In fact his attention will soon
be diverted from Arianax and Dinazel and the banks of the Sennatele
altogether by the very tragical adventures of a certain Clearte. He,
with a company of friends, visits the country of a tyrant, who is
accustomed to welcome strangers and heap them with benefits, till a time
comes (the allegory is something obvious) when he demands it all back,
with their lives, through a cruel minister (again something "speakingly"
named) "Thanate." The head of this company, Clearte, on receiving the
sentence, talks Stoicism for many pages, and when he is exhausted,
somebody else takes up the running in such a fascinating manner that it
"seemed as if he had only to go on talking to make the victims
immortal!" But the atrocious Thanate cuts, at the same moment, the
thread of the discourse and the throat of Clearte--who is, however,
transported to the dominions of Macarise,--and _histoires_ and
"ecphrases" and interspersions of verse follow as usual. But the Abbe is
nowise infirm of purpose; and the book ends with the strangest mixture
of love-letters and not very short discourses on the various schools of
philosophy, together with a Glossary or Onomasticon interpreting the
proper names which have been used after the following fashion:
"Alcarinte. _La Crainte_, du mot francais par anagramme sans aucun
changement," though how you can have an anagram without a change is not
explained.

[Sidenote: Gombauld--_Endimion._]

Perhaps one may class, if, indeed, classification is necessary, with the
religious romances of Camus and the philosophical romance of Hedelin
d'Aubignac, the earlier allegorical ones of the poet Gombauld,
_Endimion_ and _Amaranthe_. The latter I have not yet seen. _Endimion_
is rather interesting; there was an early English translation of it; and
I have always been of those who believe that Keats, somehow or other,
was more directly acquainted with seventeenth-century literature than
has generally been allowed.[211] The wanderings of the hero are as
different as possible in detail; but the fact that there _are_
wanderings at all is remarkable, and there are other coincidences with
Keats and differences from any cla