378 



ROMANCE. 



Romance. 



Metrical 

 romances 

 founded on 

 classical 

 h Story. 



By whom 

 composed. 



the English translations and imitations of them, exe- 

 cuted when the use of the French language had begun 

 to give way in this country. 



About the same time various metrical romances were 

 composed in French, and imitated both in German 

 and English, in which the old Greek heroes once more 

 make their appearance. The composers of these fol- 

 lowed the same plan as those of thj proper Gothic ro- 

 mances ; that is, they took their materials from monk- 

 ish chronicles of the Trojan and Macedonian wars 

 written in Latin. The constant habit of representing 

 the actual manners of the writer's own time being ad- 

 hered to, these romances, though professing to detail 

 the events of periods so remote, are in fact quite, or 

 nearly as valuable, to the student of our own Gothic 

 antiquities, as any others. Achilles is no more than a 

 preux chevalier, and Alexander the Great is merely 

 another shadow of Charlemagne or Arthur. Troy, 

 Babylon, &c. are only so many disguises for Palestine. 

 The theme is always the success of European arms in 

 expeditions to the east. 



The expeditions of the crusaders, however, were ce- 

 lebrated by other romances of their own age in a more 

 direct manner. Richard Cceur-de-Lion, Godfrey of 

 Bouillon, &c. shared the favour of both bards and his- 

 torians with the Rolands and Olivers, whose real or fan- 

 cied achievements had kindled their own imaginations, 

 and whom, it must be admitted, they imitated in many 

 particulars with wonderful success. 



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 ab- 

 bey, and from castle to castle, singing or reciting them 

 for the amusement of the company there assembled ; 

 others, with equal confidence and pertinacity, main- 

 taining that the works so dear to them, bear marks of 

 art and refinement altogether above what could be ex- 

 pected 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 are in the right and both in the wrong. The 

 former party, at the head of whom is Percy, the excel- 

 lent Bishop of Dromore, forget, or seems to forget, that 

 with whomsoever any species of composition originates, 

 it is always sure to be taken up and imitated by others 

 the moment its popularity is ascertained ; and that 

 therefore we may be all but certain, that the ecclesias- 

 tics 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 

 fictions of the same class. This was the popular liter- 

 ature 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 authorities produced by Sir 

 Walter Scott in his Tristram, that they were in many 

 instances treated after the same liberal fashion in Scot- 

 land. Their profession admitted originally, like most 

 others, of various degrees of excellence and of honour 



within its bound ; and it is ridiculous to suppose, that Romance. 

 the degraded condition to which it had sunk, when it \^^,<^ 

 was found necessary to suppress it altogether by sta- 

 tute in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, affords any evi- 

 dence whatever as to the character and manners of its 

 members in those earlier days, when, as there was scarce- 

 ly 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 romance in their halls. VVace was a digni- 

 fied ecclesiastic; Thomas of Erceldoun was agentleman 

 of family and fortune; yet why should we strive tolimit 

 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 Prose ro- 

 into prose ones in the course of the two or three fol- mances of 

 lowing centuries. This was the natural course of chivalry on 

 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 Merlin, Ar- 

 thur, Tristan and Yseult, Ysaie le Triste, Gyron Le 

 Courtois, Perceforest, Meliadus, Guerin de Mon- 

 glave, Galiien Rhetore, Ogier 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 

 unquestionably one of the most fruitful and interesting 

 species 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- Spanish 

 cline in popularity from the time when Lobeira* the romance. 

 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 uKworthy 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 setire. 



The first essential distinction between the romances 

 of this class and their predecessors is, that the heroes 

 of the Araadisian 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 



We give this name without hesitation ; for we consider the controversy as to the authorship of Araadis to have been quite settled by 

 Mr, Southey. 



