Nor did the effects of the passion thus awakened stop here. Other romances appeared, belonging to the same family, though not coming into the regular line of succession, such as a duplicate of the seventh book on Lisuarte, by the Canon Diaz, in 1526, and “Leandro the Fair,” in 1563, by Pedro de Luxan, which has sometimes been called the thirteenth; while in France, where they were all translated successively, as they appeared in Spain, and became instantly famous, the proper series of the Amadis romances was stretched out into twenty-four books; after all which, a certain Sieur Duverdier, grieved that many of them came to no regular catastrophe, collected the scattered and broken threads of their multitudinous stories and brought them all to an orderly sequence of conclusions, in seven large volumes, under the comprehensive and appropriate name of the “Roman des Romans.” And so ends the history of the Portuguese type of Amadis of Gaul, as it was originally presented to the world in the Spanish romances of chivalry; a fiction which, considering the passionate admiration it so long excited, and the influence it has, with little merit of its own, exercised on the poetry and romance of modern Europe ever since, is a phenomenon that has no parallel in literary history.[380] [380] The whole subject of these twelve books of Amadis in Spanish and the twenty-four in French belongs rather to bibliography than to literary history, and is among the most obscure points in both. The twelve Spanish books are said by Brunet never to have been all seen by any one bibliographer. I have seen, I believe, seven or eight of them, and own the only two for which any real value has ever been claimed,--the Amadis de Gaula, in the rare and well-printed edition of Venice, 1533, folio, and the Esplandian in the more rare, but very coarse, edition already referred to. When the earliest edition of either of them, or of most of the others, was printed cannot, I presume, be determined. One of Esplandian, of 1510, is mentioned by N. Antonio, but by nobody else in the century and a half that have since elapsed; and he is so inaccurate in such matters, that his authority is not sufficient. In the same way, he is the only authority for an edition in 1525 of the seventh book,--“Lisuarte of Greece.” But, as the twelfth book was certainly printed in 1549, the only fact of much importance is settled; viz., that the whole twelve were published in Spain in the course of about half a century. For all the curious learning on the subject, however, see an article by Salvá, in the Repertorio Americano, Lóndres, Agosto de 1827, pp. 29-39; F. A. Ebert, Lexicon, Leipzig, 1821, 4to, Nos. 479-489; Brunet, article _Amadis_; and, especially, the remarkable discussion, already referred to, by F. W. V. Schmidt, in the Wiener Jahrbücher, Band XXXIII. 1826.