The age of Elizabeth saw the rise of the prose romance. We have examples in the _Euphues_ (1579) of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sidney. As fiction these tales are weighed down with their fantastic prose styles, and with their common desire to expound a moral lesson. Their characters are rudimentary, and there is little attempt at a plot and love-theme. Yet they represent an advance, for they are fiction. They are interesting from another viewpoint. They show us that curious diffidence that was to be a drag on the production of the novel even as late as the time of Scott. Authors were shy of being novelists for two main reasons: first, there was thought to be something almost immoral in the writing of fiction, as it was but the glorification of a pack of lies; and, secondly, the liking for fiction was considered to be the craving of diseased or immature intellects, and so the production of it was unworthy of reasonable men. Thus if a man felt impelled to write fiction he had to conceal the narrative with some moral or allegorical dressing. A new type of embryo novel began to appear at the end of the sixteenth century, and, becoming very popular during the seventeenth, retained its popularity till the days of Fielding and Smollett. This class is known as the _picaresque_ novel, a name derived from the Spanish word _picaron_, which means a wandering rogue. As the name implies, it is of Spanish origin. For hero it takes a rascal who leads a wandering life, and has many adventures, most of them of a scandalous kind. The hero is the sole link between the different incidents, and there is much digression and the interposing of other short narratives. In Spain the picaresque type originated in parodies of the old romances, and of such parodies the greatest is the _Don Quixote_ (1604) of Cervantes. In France the type became common, the most famous example of it being the _Gil Blas_ (1735) of Le Sage. In England the picaresque novel had an early start in _Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller_, by Nash, (1567–1601), whose work often suggests that of Defoe. Nash’s work is crude, but it has vigor and some wit. A later effort in the same kind is _The English Rogue_ (1665), by Richard Head. The book is gross and scandalous to an extreme degree, but it has energy, and, as it takes the hero to many places on the globe, the reader obtains interesting glimpses of life in foreign parts.