The next form which the human story took was that of the stage drama. Mechanical necessity required that the collision and life changes should be represented in the speeches of the characters, as in the epic poem they had been narrated in the song of the minstrel. We have our finest examples of the stage drama in Shakespeare, and we find that the poetic language uttered by the various characters on the stage is not very different from the language uttered by the single minstrel when he was the only performer. Moreover, we find a new element which the minstrel could not very easily represent, and that is humour. In the humorous portions the poetic drama begins to be prose. The discovery of the printing press, which makes books that every man may read in his closet, has given birth to the third form of the great human story--the novel. While there can be no doubt that the novel is the form above all others in which the world to-day chooses to receive the human story, the epic poem no longer being written and the poetic drama but rarely, still we should make a mistake if we suppose that the novel is the direct child and heir of the poetic stage drama even to the same extent that the drama was the direct child and heir of epic poetry. Both the epic poem and the poetic drama have a dignity and loftiness that much more adequately represent the nobler and loftier characteristics of the human personality than the often trivial and even base and ignoble fictitious tale in the novel. The truth is, the modern novel is directly descended from the tavern tale, the amusing and entertaining narrative of the chance traveller coming unpretentiously and unexpectedly into the quiet country village. Such tavern tales we find in their purest form in the Arabian Nights and in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The stories of Sindbad the Sailor and the lovers of Boccaccio had unquestionably been told again and again by the wayfarer eager for the applause of his little audience, and had again and again been listened to by common folk whose only glimpse of the life of the outer world came through these same tavern yarns. Boccaccio collected his stories from the taverns of Italy, and wrote them out in the choicest Italian for the entertainment of his king and queen (A. D. 1348). The stories of the Arabian Nights were collected in Egypt at about the same time by some person or persons unknown, and reached the European world through the French version of Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the Arabian Nights we may find the origin of the modern romance, and in the Decameron the beginning of the modern love-story or novel.