The question by whom, or rather by what set of men these metrical romances were composed, has been made the subject of much and angry controversy; some contending that they were always the work of the minstrels, who, we know, wandered from abbey to abbey, and from castle to castle, singing or re citing them for the amusement of the company there assembled; others, with equal confidence and pertina city, maintaining that the works so dear to them, bear marks of art and refinement altogether above what could be expected in the compositions of an order of men, whom it pleases them to consider as low-bred, profligate, and vagrants, in all but the most offensive modern meaning of that term. Here, as elsewhere, it appears to us that both sides arc in the right and both in the wrong. The former party, at the head of whom is Percy, the excellent Bishop of Dromore, forget, or seems to forget, that with whom soever any species of composition originates, it is always sure to be taken up and imitated by others the moment its popularity is aseertained;—and that there fore we may be all but certain, that the ecclesiastics in whom the information and learning of those times mostly resided, and who, as their own story shows, were fond of hearing romances recited, must have indulged themselves in the compositions of other fic tions of the same class. This was the popular litera ture of the time, and that is always in the hands of the most literary persons of the time. The other party again, and particularly the venomous Ritson their chief, talk far too slightingly of the minstrels. We find that men of that class obtained large grants of land, both in England and Normandy, under the early Plantagenets; and we also know, from the autho rities produced by Sir Walter Scott in his Tristram, that they were in many instances treated after the same liberal fashion in Scotland. Their profession admitted originally, like most others, of various de grees of excellence and of honour within its bound; and it is ridiculous to suppose, that the degraded con dition to which it had sunk, when it was found neces sary to suppress it altogether by statute in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, affords any evidence whatever as to the character and manners of its members in those earlier days, when, as there was scarcely such a thing as a reading baron, the most intellectual amusement of the highest classes of society depended on the exertions of the visitors, who sung, or said, the legends of ro mance in their halls. Wace was a dignified ecclesias tic;—Thomas of Ereeldoun was a gentleman of fami ly and fortune;—yet why should we strive to limit the claims of genius in a much humbler class of life, we who have in our time seen so much poetical genius spring up and command the attention of the world from the very bosom of our peasantry ? The metrical romances were gradually converted into prose ones in the course of the two or three fol lowing centuries. This was the natural course of things. Taste for this kind of fiction growing, that form of composition in which it was the most fully and elaborately brought out, gained favour, and the rhymes of the old minstrels, by whomsoever written, gave place to longer and much more artificial tales in prose;—to those romantic histories, in short, of 'Mer lin, Arthur, Tristan and Yseult, Ysaie le Triste, Gv ron Le Courtois, Perceforest, Meliadus, Guerin de Monglave, Gallien Rhetore, Ogler le Danois, Dolin de Mayence, and the other works of the same order, which are all of them fully described by the modern authors already referred to, and from which unques tionably one of the most fruitful and interesting spe cies of modern European literature has been derived, through but one or two easy gradations of descent.
The French prose romance of chivalry began to de cline in popularity from the time when Lobeira* the Portuguese, (who lived in the fourteenth century) composed the first four books of Amadis de Gaul.
This formed the commencement of an altogether new series of chivalrous romances. The adventures of Amadis himself were so extended by imitators of the original author, as to fill twenty-five books; 'and Pal merin of England, Esplandean, Florismond of Greece. Belianis, and a variety of other works all grew out of the same new field of fiction. Lobeira had the merit of introducing a regularity of plan and purpose alto gether unknown to his Norman predecessors; he en riched his web of fiction by a more skilful exposition and contrast of character: he gave far more dramatic truth to his interlocutors, and finally he composed in a style infinitely more artificial and elegant. His great work, therefore, obtained an easy victory over the prose tales of Arthur and Charlemagne, and some of his imitators were not unworthy of partaking his tri umph. But it must be confessed that his school was upon the whole a miserable one, and that the continual accumulation of inferior stories of the Amadis race had become a real nuisance, more especially in Spain, long before Cervantes appeared to put an end to it by his irresistible satire.
The first essential distinction between the romances of this class and their predecessors is, that the heroes of the Amadisian cycle are altogether imaginary per sonages: the second is, that in these works the atten tion is always fixed upon the fortunes of some one hero or heroine. We are no longer occupied with national events, or with national feelings, but with the exploits and adventures of individual knights. This was an important step in the history of romantic fic tion. It marks the transition to another state of so ciety. The great collisions between peoples of differ ent races contending for country and faith had passed over; and romance, following the stream, betook her self to the influence of the spirit of chivalry upon private knights—their wild and wavering adventures —their restless life—their tournaments, duels, and other mockeries of war.
Another species of fictitious writing sprung up also in Spain, under the name of the pastoral romance. George de Montemayor, a man of' great talents, first gave vogue to this kind of writing by his Diana, a work which was long most extensively popular, and from an episode in which, Shakspeare has taken the story of his Two Gentlemen of Verona. Cervantes laughed at the absurdities or AIontemayor's disciples; but his own first romance, the Galatea, was after all a production or the very same school. The wearisome languors of the Arcadian existence depicted in the works of this brood, their piping sentimental shep herds, and crook-bearing heroines, their fade and un manly tone, were radical and ineradicable absurdities, and not even the names of Montemayor, Cervantes, and our own Sir Philip Sidney, have been able to keep their productions of this class from total neglect—all but total oblivion.
We may despatch in as few words the heroic ro mance as it was called of the seventeenth century. This was begun by Vonore D'Urre, a fantastic cha racter, who wished to shadow out some adventures of his own family under a stately disguise of remote manners. He was much obliged to the unreadable love romances of the later Greeks, but on the whole his colouring is the reflection of the romance of chi valry. He was followed by Madame Scuderi and other writers of considerable talent, who in vain endeavour ed to give life to a species of composition radically absurd. Nevertheless the melanchtNy metaphysics of this school of amorous fiction, its ridiculously over strained sentimentality, its pompous affectations of all sorts, found favour for a time; the enormous folios in which these follies were embodied, continued to infest the taste of the reading public until the nature and sense of the modern novel appeared, and gave them the coup-de-grace.