Sudden, however, as was this crop of warriors wielding pen, it must not be forgotten that the dragon's teeth had first been sown in mediaeval soil. With Lyly the English novel came into being, but that child of his genius was not without ancestry or relations. And so, before discussing the character and fortunes of the infant, let us devote a few introductory remarks to pedigree. Roughly speaking, the prose narrative in England, before _Euphues_, falls into three divisions, the romance of chivalry, the _novella_, and the moral Court treatise,--and all three are of foreign extraction, that is to say, they are represented in England by translations only. Chaucer indeed is a mine of material suitable for the novel, but the father of English literature elected to write in verse, and his _Canterbury Tales_ have no appreciable influence upon the later prose story. For some reason, the mediaeval prose narrative seems to have been confined to the so-called Celtic races. Certainly, both the romance of chivalry and the _novella_ are to be traced back to French sources. The _novella_, which, at our period, had become thoroughly naturalized in Italy, under the auspices of Boccaccio, had originally sprung from the _fabliaux_ of 13th century France. Nor was the _fabliau_ the only article of French production which found a new and more stimulative home across the Alps; for just as it is possible to trace the German Reformation back, through Huss, to its birth in Wycliff's England, so French critics have delighted to point out that the Italian Renaissance itself was but an expansion of an earlier Renaissance in France, which, for all the strength and maturity it gained under its new conditions, lost much of that indescribable flavour of direct simplicity and gracious sweetness which breathes from the pages of _Aucassin and Nicolette_ and its companion _Amis and Amile_. Under Charles VIII. and his successors this Renaissance was carried home, as it were, to die--so subtle is the ebb and flow of intellectual influences between country and country. In England the _novella_, of which Chaucer had made ample use, first appeared in prose dress from the printing-press of Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde. The Dutch printer had also published Lord Berners' translation of _Huon of Bordeaux_, the best romance of chivalry belonging to the Charlemagne cycle. But, before the dawn of the 16th century Malory had already given us _Morte D'Arthur_, from the Arthurian cycle, printed, as everyone knows, by the industrious Caxton himself. Thus, if we neglect, as I think we may, translations from the _Gesta Romanorum_, we may say that the prose narrative appeared in England simultaneously with the printing-press, a fact which is more than coincidence; since the multiplication of books, which Caxton began, decreased the necessity for remembering tales; and therefore it was now possible to dispense with the aid of verse; in fact Caxton deprived the minstrel of his occupation.