To what extent I am right in advancing the suggestion that Eastern and Eastern-European audiences had tougher brain-stuffs than their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries, at any rate in the matter of listening to recitals of tales in prose or verse, the reader may decide for himself. The suggestion is nevertheless handy as presenting a certain not unuseful image. We may say that the printing press killed alike the epic and all forms of metrical romance, or we may say that the epic and the metrical romance are essentially foreign to the taste of the Occidental reader--and the second statement is in effect merely a repetition in other terms of the first. Into that I do not propose to go. It is sufficient to say that when I do make the assertion I find myself, as it were unexpectedly, in company with the academic critic of to-day and yesterday. At any rate, quite orthodox authorities have not unusually asserted that Romaunts or Romances were, in England at least, intended for the personal reading of the mediaeval courtly and clerical individual, whilst the shorter lays, virelais, ballads, and the like were aimed, as being less fatiguing, at popular and numerous audiences. This seems to be merely common sense. On the other hand, very long metrical or prose compositions did simultaneously appeal to Oriental audiences and it is not unusual in academic circles to describe the _Canterbury Tales_ themselves as “Oriental in origin,” which seems queer but may for the moment pass. What, however, I am anxious to establish--at the risk of a certain prolixity--is the fact that an appetite for fiction amounting also to an expression of a necessity has, at least since the Dark Ages till the present day, distinguished all humanity. The reason probably is, as I have already hinted, that we need accounts of human life not so much as matter from which to draw morals for our own particular cases but rather as something that will take us outside ourselves and, as it were, to a height from which we may the better observe ourselves and our neighbours. The moral is usually thrown in by the moralist who nevertheless insists or at any rate asserts that moralizing is the sole purpose of his life and work. But the Morality Plays of the Nun Hrotswitha, the Mysteries of every English town from Salisbury to Lytham, the terrifically moralizing novels from _Guzman d’Alfarache_ to the history of _Moll Flanders_, were simply evidence of the fact that humanity did not want moralizing and did want fiction. They represent the moralist throwing up the sponge and trying to get a pinch of salt on to the tail of that difficult bird, man. It is obvious that large audiences in days of complete boredom could be found for the sermons of ranting monks and violent reformers. But even at that the appeal was largely fictional and what the audiences went to hear--as was the case with, say, Savonarola--was rather semi-hysterical and lively