With the pensions and fashions which were sent across the Channel from the court of Louis XIV, came a curious species of fiction which had a temporary vogue in England. Gomberville, Scuderi, and Calprenede had created the school of Heroic Romance by the publication of those monumental works which the French not inaptly termed "les romans de longue haleine." This was the bulky but enervated descendant of chivalric and pastoral romance. The tales of chivalry and of pastoral life had their _raison d'etre_. The feudal knighthood found in the tournaments, in the adventures of knight-errantry, and in the supernatural agencies which filled their volumes of romance, the reflection of their own aspirations and beliefs. They admired in the ideal characters of Charlemagne and Arthur the qualities most valued among themselves. Martial glory was to them the chief object of life; love was simply the reward of valor. The pastoral romance followed in less warlike times. Its subject was love; and that passion was usually described amidst humble and peaceful shepherds, where its strength and charm could develop more fully than amidst scenes of war and tumult. Both the chivalric and the pastoral romance were the embodiment of ideals which in turn represented contemporary tastes. But heroic romance, although it shared some of the characteristics of its predecessors, had not the same claim to interest. It was unnatural and artificial, rather than ideal. It imitated the martial character of the tales of chivalry, but subordinated that character to love. It imitated the devoted strain of adoration which ran through the fanciful phrases of pastoral fiction; but that artificial passion which seemed appropriate to ideal shepherds tuning their pipes under a perpetual sunshine, became absurd when applied to Greek or Carthaginian soldiers.