IV., who had translated
it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the
source of Landor's poem, "Gebir." When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose
Aylmer--

"Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes,
May weep but never see"--

lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's "Progress of Romance," borrowed from a
circulating library at Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains
a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages
in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest
passages in Landor's life.

Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's "Essay on the Ancient
Minstrels," mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton,
and other authorities. "It was not till I had completed my design," she
writes in her preface, "that I read either Dr. Beattie's 'Dissertation on
Fable and Romance' or Mr. Warton's 'History of English Poetry.'" The
former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the
author of "The Minstrel." It is of no great importance and follows
pretty closely the lines of Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," to
which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes. The author pursues the
beaten track in inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the
Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of
chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, it seems, was "one of the
consequences of chivalry. The first writers in this way exhibited a
species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. They
undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed
knight-errantry. The world was then ignorant and credulous and
passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They
believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every
imaginable species of necromancy. These form the materials of the old
romance. The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious,
valiant, adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters befriended and
others opposed him. To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself
worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant,
cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish
the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or,
with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening
earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean. He detected and