proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than is usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than _Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of literary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, the Knight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of the century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal duller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read _Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would go much lower. [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W. Thackeray_. _Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or third book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena (a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejected with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain, but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece, Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and considerably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's verse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of the time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--far the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or drama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny prose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, more