Pseudo-Dares--Pseudo-Dictys | Benoît de Sainte-Maure | Guido de Colonna | The English Romances. Through Caxton's printed "Book of Troy," the story continued popular, a cheap edition appeared in the eighteenth century. Each of Homer's poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, deals but with the adventures of a fortnight, or six weeks, but the mediaeval readers wanted, and from the romancers received, the whole history of the ten years' siege, and more, with Christian legends thrown in, with minute descriptions of all the characters--Cassandra "gleyit a little," had a slight cast of the eye like Mary Stuart. The heroes fight as mounted knights, not in chariots; they use cross-bows as well as long-bows; and Hector kills men by the thousand, with more than Irish exaggeration. As Hector _must_ be killed, Achilles suddenly charges him in front, while his shield is slung behind. Had a Trojan poet left an epic on the war he would not have told the story otherwise. The poet of the Laud "Troy Book" bids God curse Æneas as a traitor, forgetting, apparently, that the British are descendants of Æneas. King Alisaundre. The history of Alexander with all manner of romantic and fabulous additions, under the name "King Alisaundre," is in rhyming couplets of eight syllables to each line; the couplets are often irregular, as in Coleridge's "Christabel," and the story, like most of the English romances of this period, is borrowed through the French, from a late fabulous Greek work. This kind of versified romance endured till Chaucer thought it tiresome, and parodied it, in "Sir Thopas". These _rhyming_ English romances, in various forms of verse, were made for ladies and gentlemen who, already, were not able to read the more artistic and elaborate French romances for themselves; but were very well able to take pleasure in stories of true love and miraculous adventures. The romances set a fashion which was continued in the endless heroic novels in prose, French, and English, down to the end of the seventeenth century. The Middle Ages had no taste for novels of ordinary life, about people of their own time. These, in England, do not begin to appear till the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and then nearly a century and a half passed before they became really popular. If much has been said about these old romances it is because they have so powerfully impressed themselves on the fancy of all later English poets, from Shakespeare and Milton, who dreamed of an epic on Arthur, and delighted in the sonorous names of Arthur's knights, to Tennyson and William Morris. The romances, composed of fancies from so many sources and times, Greek, Celtic, Roman, and French, and English, are like that Corinthian bronze composed of gold and silver, copper and lead, all molten together at the burning of Corinth. In this rich metal poets of later times have moulded figures in their own fashion.