The novel presents one of the most remarkable examples in literary history of arrested development, and of all departments of literature is perhaps the only one which failed to attain perfection in the hands of the ancients. Great progress is indeed observable from its first artless beginnings under the Pharaohs, so recently recovered for us; but having advanced far along several lines, it becomes stationary upon all. The germ of the picaresque novel is clearly discernible in Petronius, of the novel of adventure in Apuleius, of erotic fiction in Longus; but these examples apparently remain ineffectual. Either the path is not prosecuted at all, or it leads to mere repetition. No new element appears until we encounter the chivalric romance, which in Spain produced an extensive prose literature, but in Italy ran almost entirely to verse. The more elaborate romances of Boccaccio, indeed, disclose influences from this quarter; but their reputation was slight in comparison with those short and familiar tales, commonly founded upon some anecdote and dealing with scenes and personages of real life, which prescribed the form for the national novelette. A more distinctively national type never existed. The extraordinary thing is that the nation never got beyond it. It should have seemed an obvious advance to lengthen the stories; to stimulate surprise and suspense by greater intricacy of plot; to embellish by elaborate description; to depict character with fulness and exactness; to employ fiction for the ventilation of ideas. Precedents for all these improvements, except the last, might have been found in the classical romances, and it might have been expected that fiction would have experienced the same development as other branches of literature. On the contrary, the last Italian novelette is as far from the novel of the nineteenth century as the first, and the most powerful literary agent of good or evil, next to the equally modern newspaper, remained to be created in recent times. Whatever the defects of the Italian novel of the sixteenth century, it was nevertheless, unlike the drama, a thoroughly national form of composition, it was far in advance of anything of the kind existing elsewhere, and it exerted great influence on the literature of other countries as the general storehouse of dramatic plots.