ROMANCE is defined by Dr. Johnson " a military fa ble of the middle ages ; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry." A distinguished author of our own time* considers this definition as not sufficiently comprehen sive, and substitutes 4 4 a fictitious narrative in prose or verse, the interest of which turns on marvellous and un common incidents ;"—considering romance as thus op posed to novel, which he defines "a fictitious narrative differing from the romance,because accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society." But if the definition of Dr. Johnson be too Darrow, that of our contemporary can scarcely fail to be looked upon as by far too wide. It takes in equally the Iliad, the Batrachomyomachia, Amadis of Gaul, Don Quixote, the Morte Arthur, and the Tales of my Land lord. The novel, moreover, is not distinguished from the romance by being accommodated to the ordinary train of human events. No such novel ever existed. The author of Tom Jones makes demands on our credu lity not much inferior in reality to those we meet with in the pages of Gulliver, and at all events differing from them only in degree. Nor can we see any good reason why the scene of a novel (taking that word even in its strictest sense) might not be laid in any time or country, however remote (provided the writer had sufficient knowledge of the customs and manners of antiquity) as well as in modern France or England. Mrs. Radcliffe has written many genuine romances without departing from modern times; and \Vaverley, though styled a nor vel on its title page, is far more near of kin to Ivanhoe than to Peregrine Pickle. The touch of genius can in vest the most ordinary situations with the deepest and most romantic interest, and as Othello is as genuine a tragedy as Lear, so is Werter as genuine a romance as Tristram.
The truth is that the authors of all fictitious narratives as the very name shows) endeavour to give an air of reality to their performances ; and so much depends on the genius of the artist, and so little on aught besides, that a Swift could give more of the air of homely truth to the wildest of all possible imaginations than an ordi nary author can throw over his descriptions of the tam est incidents in a story of every day life.
Leaving this, at least for the present, we find no difi culty as to the origin of the term romance. The fictitious narratives in which our ancestors of the middle ages de lighted were originally composed, or at least first gained general notice and favour, in dialects formed out of the Roman language, by the admixture, in greater or less proportions, of the idioms and vocahlcs of the Teutonic tribes, which overthrew the empire of Rome and took possession of her provinces. The French language, the
Italian, the Spanish, were all equally styled romance dialects, in contradistinction to the Latin on the one hand, and the native dialects of the Gothic nations on the other. Even the English tongue was sometimes distinguished by the same name ;t and indeed at one period, hovering as that language did between the two rival sets of ele ments which are now so equally and so inextricably blended in it, and difficult as the scholars of the time must have found it to decide what its future fate might be, it is no wonder that a Welsh or an Anglo-Saxon antiqua ry should have adopted such phraseology. The name was easily transferred from these mixed dialects, to the most popular productions composed during several cen turies in them ;—and has ended in being applied all over Europe not to those compositions only, but to various classes of fictitious narrative which have successively filled their place among the nations of Europe ; and all of which, it may be added, are essentially the descend ants of that original species of composition whose name they have inherited.
As all fiction aims at being mistaken (in a certain sense) for truth, so all fictitious narrative is originally formed or founded on historical materials. The more we become acquainted with the literatures of nations the most remote from us in local situation, and in apparent manners, the more complete becomes our conviction that literature has always followed the same general march. The first efforts of literature have always been to embalm the memories and magnify the deeds of the departed heroes of the tribe or nation among which that literature springs into existence. The first Greek poets celebrated those Greek heroes, who afterwards became the gods and demi-gods of the Greek mythology. The first Scandinavian poets celebrated the chiefs who yen ducted their early emigrations from Asia into the north of Europe. Homer sung the war of Troy. The first min strels of modern Europe celebrated the Gothic, Frankish, and Burgundian heroes who flourished during the period of the great northern emigrations.