and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets, preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his _Apologie_ the fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative literature. The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and Alexander. Some of these were written in prose originally, but the majority were translations, paraphrases, or recensions of metrical narratives. Some were turned into verse again, and again in that form were the material for further prose recensions. And throughout these transformations the matter, the style, and the spirit of the stories underwent hardly any change. It was only now and then that the versifier gave a rein to imagination in his battles and pageants; or was hurried by the swing of the metre into bursts of lyricism, or a more dramatic curtness in the dialogue; or cut short the explication of motive and plot, which the prose-writer was inclined to elaborate. How well the prose sufficed to the minstrel converting it into his own idiom may be seen by comparing such a metrical romance as the Scots poem, _Lancelot of the Laik_, with the samples of the French prose story from which it was translated, in the edition by the Early English Text Society. There is very little poetical heightening except where the minstrel tacks on a prologue of his own composing; the rest is but the effect of the paraphraser’s occasional impulse to change and invent.[i01] Certainly these {x} writers were not embarrassed by any preconceptions of a strict boundary line between prose and the language of poetry, and the uses for which either was especially ordained. The traditional themes were handled, in both verse and prose, in the same traditional manner, and were animated by the same spirit of romantic adventure.