But serious romantic fiction, which is peculiarly the offspring of modern civilization, was not yet far enough developed to enable one like Cervantes to obtain a high degree of success in it, especially as the natural bent of his genius was to humorous fiction. The imaginary travels of Lucian, three or four Greek romances, and the romances of chivalry, were all he had to guide him; for any thing approaching nearer to the proper modern novel than some of his own tales had not yet been imagined. Perhaps his first impulse was to write a romance of chivalry, modified by the spirit of the age, and free from the absurdities which abound in the romances that had been written before his time.[162] But if he had such a thought, the success of his own Don Quixote almost necessarily prevented him from attempting to put it in execution. He therefore looked rather to the Greek romances, and, as far as he used any model, took the “Theagenes and Chariclea” of Heliodorus.[163] He calls what he produced “A Northern Romance,” and makes its principal story consist of the sufferings of Persiles and Sigismunda,--the first the son of a king of Iceland, and the second the daughter of a king of Friesland,--laying the scene of one half of his fiction in the North of Europe, and that of the other half in the South. He has some faint ideas of the sea-kings and pirates of the Northern Ocean, but very little of the geography of the countries that produced them; and as for his savage men and frozen islands, and the wild and strange adventures he imagines to have passed among them, nothing can be more fantastic and incredible. [162] This may be fairly suspected from the beginning of the 48th chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote. [163] Once he intimates that it is a translation, but does not say from what language. (See opening of Book II.) An acute and elegant critic of our own time says, “Des naufrages, des déserts, des descentes par mer, et des ravissements, c’est donc toujours plus ou moins l’ancien roman d’Héliodore.” (Sainte Beuve, Critiques, Paris, 1839, 8vo, Tom. IV. p 173.) These words describe more than half of the Persiles and Sigismunda. Two imitations of the Persiles, or, at any rate, two imitations of the Greek romance which was the chief model of the Persiles, soon appeared in Spain. The first is the “Historia de Hipólito y Aminta” of Francisco de Quintana, (Madrid, 1627, 4to), divided into eight books, with a good deal of poetry intermixed. The other is “Eustorgio y Clorilene, Historia Moscovica,” by Enrique Suarez de Mendoza y Figueroa, (1629), in thirteen books, with a hint of a continuation; but my copy was printed Çaragoça, 1665, 4to. Both are written in bad taste, and have no value as fictions. The latter seems to have been plainly suggested by the Persiles.