imaginative powers their full fling. In the beauty of its ladies, the size of its giants, the valour, constancy, and self-denial of its heroes, the _Amadis_ eclipses all its rivals; and in the _Palmerins_ and _Esplandians_ that were the sequel, these exaggerations are carried to even more ridiculous lengths. The older romances had usually been localised in actual places and countries, though these were often idealised out of all likeness to reality; but Amadis and his successors met with their adventures and performed their feats of arms in a region created by the fancy of their authors. Spenser’s Fairy Land, and Sidney’s Arcadia were no doubt suggested by this romantic geography. Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the _Eclogues_ of Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy {xii} were avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil. Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his _Daphnis and Chloe_ depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel began its course with the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the _Galatea_ of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of _Diana_, who added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s _Arcadia_, in which the spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.