The strictly _literary_ prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented--outside of the _Arcadia_ and _Euphues_ already mentioned--chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian _novelle_. George Turberville's _Tragical Tales_ (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_ (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio's _Decameron_ and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's _Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources respectively of Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against "Martin Marprelate," an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash's _Piers Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with a Hatchet_, and Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the _Chronicle of England_, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot. Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most important was Richard Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the first four books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of law, and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would doubtless have been written in Latin.