It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were "harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish "picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale, which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also. The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key" interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction. Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus, Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years (1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth century. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Parismenus_: the second part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_ pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of the first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions to elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure _Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine (of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman") is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--but separations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and the like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the "contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if ever there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500 very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of