THE hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers and the English novelists was not a period of great story-telling like the fifty that were to follow it, or the first half of the nineteenth century. It is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a complete change of audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a light-hearted and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new one. The change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular before and after. Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling of the first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. He is referring to spoken tales, but his description applies quite as well to tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in the most solitarie times busie our minds with, are cards, tables and dice ... merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, theeves, cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, _quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione_, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material of Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's _Faërie Queene_, of the early rogue books, and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by Greene and Lodge and Pettie. [A more sober spirit.] By 1640 things had already changed a little. James Mabbe, the quaint flavour of whose Tudor style, endearing as the moss on an old house, reminds us that he published his translation of six of the _Exemplary Novels_ before Cervantes had been dead for a quarter of a century, felt that he had to apologise for them to the more sober spirit of the time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,' he writes, 'both in Church and Common-weale, will sometimes leave off their more serious discourses, and entertain themselves with matters of harmelesse Merriment and Disports. Such are these stories I present unto your view. I will not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading them, but I promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so often varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in the end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the mid-seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible that the simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss by these people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a Cromwell and a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a _Pilgrim's Progress_. Only, in contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident appeal to a Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents, and happy conclusions--a delight only different from that of the Elizabethans in its anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it had enjoyed them. [Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN] [Bunyan's world.]