And Sidney adds that this fact is not to be made light of merely because the works of Nature are “essential” while the poet’s are only “in imitation or fiction”. The poet has contemplated the “Ideas” behind Nature, and it is those which he “delivers forth, as he hath imagined them”. With ten or twenty new novels appearing on the bookstalls every week it is not so easy for us to realize the dignity and glory which were once felt to distinguish this great human achievement of _fiction_—that is, of ‘making’ or ‘making up’ (from the Latin ‘fingere’, to ‘form’ or ‘make’) purely imaginary forms, instead of merely copying Nature. Now the presence of a made-up element, especially when it comprised supernatural beings such as giants and fairies, was held to be one of the distinguishing marks of a _romance_. The old medieval romances, as their name suggests, had been nursed to life in that curious period of contact between Roman and Celtic myth which also gave us such words as _fairy_ and _sorcery_.[70] They were so called because they were written or recited in the _romance_ vernacular[71] instead of in literary Latin, and they seem to have developed out of an increasing tendency among the medieval bards to embroider, on their own responsibility, the traditional accounts of historical and mythical events. This tendency, wherever it had hitherto been detected among the western Aryans, had been strenuously opposed in the interests of learning and morality. It was one of the reasons why Plato decided to expel poets from his Republic, and it is remarkable that the earlier uses of a word like _fable_ in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French and fourteenth-century English should have been all condemnatory. Now by the time the Renaissance dawned on England this word had come to be applied, in one instance at least, not merely to the embroidery, but to the garment itself, so that, for example, the whole prodigious fabric of classical mythology might be implicit in the disparaging phrase “fables of poets”. And after the Revival of Learning, when the most able men began to have a very different feeling towards the myths of Greece and Rome, such a phrase became the very opposite of disparaging. _Fiction_ and _romance_ were gradually recognized as a legitimate and noble expression of the human spirit.