A change of style is almost invariably the result of a change of thought and feeling; but no profound mental and moral revolution like that which underlay the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, was the occasion for turning the mediaeval romances into prose. When all literary compositions were intended for singing and recitation, they naturally took a metrical form; but when books were meant to be read in bower and cloister, it was left to the writer to choose his vehicle. Thus, while there were true poets like Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach among those working upon the material of legend, many arrayed themselves in the poetic vesture without having a spark of divine fire; and the style of many of these metrical narratives strikes one as too prosaic for the subject, especially if we base our expectations on Malory, to us the chief exemplar of mediaeval romance, whose prose, though not in the least resembling in structure that bastard thing, prose poetry, is thoroughly epical in its stark simplicity, its sensuous colour, and the haunting suggestion of beauty and ideality. It was not an age of poetry in the way this can be said of the early period of Greek literature, when philosophers, historians, and lawgivers spoke in metre because the muse was in them. Romance is the decadence of poetry; and while the traditional forms survived, the poetic impulse grew weaker and weaker. {xi} By Caxton and his successors the prose romances of the age of chivalry were multiplied and circulated among wider audiences than even those who listened to the mediaeval jongleur: these were the first popular novels of the Tudor age, yet they were already getting out of date, inasmuch as they reflected the manners and the ideals of a bygone period. But there had arisen on the continent two forms of romance that represent another stage in the development of fiction; the Spanish chivalric romance typified in _Amadis of Gaul_, and the pastoral novel of Sanazzaro and Montemayor. The three great legendary cycles, no matter how wild and fabulous their later excursions, always claimed to be a reading of history; each writer was careful to state his authorities, real or fictitious; and though he added life and circumstance to his narrative, the substance was put forward and accepted as history. In Spain romance had begun exactly as in Britain with poetic chronicles of heroic periods, such as the story of the Cid, round which gathered in the process of time a vast accretion of anonymous legend. But in the _Amadis_, printed in 1508, but current in oral or manuscript versions for two centuries at least, Spain gave birth to a kind of romance in which such history even as that in the legendary chronicles had no place. Amadis himself, it is true, was connected with the Arthuriad by his lineage; but with this exception, the author or authors let both history and historical tradition go, and in the various knight-errantries of Amadis gave to their