[109] That the not quite unknown device of setting up a man of straw in order to knock him down has not been followed in this chapter, a single piece of evidence out of many may be cited. H. Koerting in his justly well reputed _Geschichte des Franz. Romans im XVII. Jahrh._ (Oppeln u. Leipzig, 1891, i. 133 _note_) would rule Rabelais out of the history of the novel altogether. This book, which will be quoted again with gratitude later, displays a painstaking erudition not necessitating any make-weight of sympathy for its author's early death after great suffering. It is extremely useful; but it does not escape, in this and other places, the censure which, ten years before the war of 1914, the present writer felt it his duty to express on modern German critics and literary historians generally (_History of Criticism_, London, 1904, vol. iii. Bks. viii. and ix.), that on points of literary appreciation, as distinguished from mere philology, "enumeration," bibliographical research, and the like, they are "sadly to seek." It may not be impertinent to add that Herr Koerting's history happened never to have been read by me till after the above chapter of the present book was written. CHAPTER VII THE SUCCESSORS OF RABELAIS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE "AMADIS" ROMANCES In the present chapter we shall endeavour to treat two divisions of actual novel- or at least fiction-writing--strikingly opposed to each other in character; and a third subject, to include which in the title would have made that title too long, and which is not strictly a branch of novel-_writing_, but which had perhaps as important an influence on the progress of the novel itself as anything mentioned or to be mentioned in all this _History_. The first division is composed of the followers--sometimes in the full, always in the chronological sense--of Rabelais, a not very strong folk as a rule, but including one brilliant example of co-operative work, and two interesting, if in some degree problematical, persons. The second, strikingly contrasting with the general if not the universal tendency of the first, is the great translated group of _Amadis_ romances, which at once revived romance of the older kind itself, and exercised a most powerful, if not an actually generative, influence on newer forms which were themselves to pass into the novel proper. The third is the increasing body of memoir- and anecdote-writers who, with Brantome at their head, make actual personages and actual events the subjects of a kind of story-telling, not perhaps invariably of unexceptionable historic accuracy, but furnishing remarkable situations of plot and suggestions of character, together with abundant new examples of the "telling" faculty itself. [Sidenote: Subsidiary importance of Brantome and other character-mongers.]