For a long time the knight and his adventures held the place of honor in fiction; but the time came when improbable or impossible achievements began to pall. The knight who meets with all kinds of adventures and rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in _Don Quixote_ by the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This world-famous romance shows by its ridicule that the taste for the impossible adventures of chivalry was beginning to pall. The following title to one of the chapters of _Don Quixote_ is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter LVIII.--Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in Such Numbers that they gave him No Breathing Time." Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan Age. We have seen that Lyly's _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_ contain the germs of romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert Greene (1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), helped to give to Shakespeare the plots of two of his plays. Greene's novel _Pandosto_ suggested the plot of _The Winter's Tale_, and Lodge's _Rosalind_ was the immediate source of the plot of _As You Like It_. Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His most popular stories deal with the passion of love as well as with adventure. He was also the pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the slums to study life at first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers and rascals of London and published his observations in a series of realistic pamphlets. [Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR ROBBED OF HIS DRINK. _From a British Museum MS._] Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was the one who introduced into England the picaresque novel in _The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke Wilton_ (1594). The picaresque novel (Spanish, _picaro_, a rogue) is a story of adventure in which rascally tricks play a prominent part. This type of fiction came from Spain and attained great popularity in England. Jacke Wilton is page to a noble house. Many of his sharp tricks were doubtless drawn from real life. Nashe is a worthy predecessor of Defoe in narrating adventures that seem to be founded on actual life. In spite of an increasing tendency to picture the life of the time, Elizabethan prose fiction did not entirely discard the matter and style of the medieval romances. All types of prose fiction were then too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual events. Even realists like Greene did not present typical Elizabethan life. The greatest realist in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from the everyday life of common people. He had been a traveling artisan, and he knew how to paint "the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop." He wrote _The Gentle Craft_, a collection of tales about shoemakers, and _Jack of Newberry_, a story of a weaver.