See H. F. Cary, _The Early French Poets_ (1846). HEROIC ROMANCES, the name by which is distinguished a class of imaginative literature which flourished in the 17th century, principally in France. The beginnings of modern fiction in that country took a pseudo-bucolic form, and the celebrated _Astree_ (1610) of Honore d'Urfe (1568-1625), which is the earliest French novel, is properly styled a pastoral. But this ingenious and diffuse production, in which all is artificial, was the source of a vast literature, which took many and diverse forms. Although its action was, in the main, languid and sentimental, there was a side of the _Astree_ which encouraged that extravagant love of glory, that spirit of "panache," which was now rising to its height in France. That spirit it was which animated Marin le Roy, sieur de Gomberville (1600-1674), who was the inventor of what have since been known as the Heroical Romances. In these there was experienced a violent recrudescence of the old medieval elements of romance, the impossible valour devoted to a pursuit of the impossible beauty, but the whole clothed in the language and feeling and atmosphere of the age in which the books were written. In order to give point to the chivalrous actions of the heroes, it was always hinted that they were well-known public characters of the day in a romantic disguise. In the _Astree_ of Honore d'Urfe, which was a pure pastoral, in the religious romances of Pierre Camus (1582-1653), in the comic _Francion_ of Charles Sorel, piquancy had been given to the recital by this belief that real personages could be recognized under the disguises. But in the _Carithee_ of Gomberville (1621) we have a pastoral which is already beginning to be a heroic romance, and a book in which, under a travesty of Roman history, an appeal is made to an extravagantly chivalrous enthusiasm. A further development was seen in the _Polyxene_ (1623) of Francois de Moliere, and the _Endymion_ (1624) of Gombauld; in the latter the elderly queen, Marie de' Medici, was celebrated under the disguise of Diana, for whom a beautiful shepherd of Caria (the author himself) nourishes a hopeless passion. The earliest of the Heroic Romances, pure and simple, is, however, the celebrated _Polexandre_ (1629) of Gomberville. The author began by intending his hero to represent Louis XIII., but he changed his mind, and drew a portrait of Cardinal Richelieu. In this novel, for the first time, the romantic character proper to this class of books is seen undiluted; there is no intrusion of a personage who is not celebrated for his birth, his beauty or his exploits. The story deals with the adventures of a hero who visits all the sea-coasts of the world, the most remote as well as the most fabulous, in search of an ineffable princess, Alcidiane. This absurd and pretentious, yet very original piece of invention enjoyed an immense success, and historical romances of a similar class competed for the favour of the public.