Of the longer tale of antiquity a convenient type is the _Daphnis and Chloe_ ascribed to Longus. A plot no less ancient than that of the foundling reared in simple life and ultimately reclaimed by noble parents receives from the Greek author the form of a pastoral[26] romance, with episodes, complications, and a fairy-tale ending. Its form, then, is essentially the same as the form of _Aucassin and Nicolette_, _Florus and Jehane_, _Amis and Amile_, and other typical short romances of the middle age. Between such short romances and the modern short story there is the same difference of form as between Chaucer’s tale of the Man of Law, which is one of the former, and his tale of the Pardoner, which foreshadows how such material may be handled in the way of the latter. For Chaucer, as in his _Troilus and Criseyde_ he anticipates the modern novel, so in his Pardoner anticipates the modern short story. The middle age and the Renaissance, even antiquity,[27] show isolated, sporadic instances of short story, whether in prose or in verse; but these are apart from the drift of the time. Aside from such sporadic cases, the longer mediæval tale or short romance, though often in length within the limits of short story, is typically loose as to time and place, and as to incident accumulative of marvels. It is to the long mediæval romance what the modern tale--not the modern short story--is to the modern novel. And it is a constant form from Greece--even from India and Egypt,[28] down to the present. In form the Alexandrian _Daphnis and Chloe_, the mediæval _Aucassin and Nicolette_, and the whole herd of modern tales, such as Miss Edgeworth’s, are essentially alike. The modern time has differentiated two forms: first, the novel, in which character is progressively developed, incidents progressively complicated and resolved; second, the short story, in which character and action are so compressed as to suggest by a single situation without development. The former is as it were an expansion of the tale; the latter, a compression. In both cases the modern art of fiction seems to have learned from the drama. Meantime the original, naïve tale has endured, and doubtless will endure. To employ the figure of speech by which M. Brunetière is enabled to speak of literature in terms of evolution, the tale is the original jackal. From it have been developed two distinct species; but their parent stock persists. Indeed, for aught we can see from the past, posterity may behold a reversion to type. [Sidenote: The Decameron.]