One of their chief pleasures was to tell their own stories. Of this neither they nor their listeners were ever tired. Whenever in the course of the tale a new person is introduced, the first thing he is expected to do is to tell us who he is and what he has seen of the world. Sometimes stories are included in his own, and when the first are finished, instead of taking up again the thread of the main tale, we merely resume the hearing of the speaker's own adventures: a custom which sometimes proves very puzzling to the inattentive frivolous reader of to-day. As for the supposed listeners in the tale itself, the men or women the hero has secured for his audience, they well knew what to expect, and took their precautions accordingly. We sometimes see them go to bed in order to listen more comfortably. In "Cassandre," the eunuch Tireus has a story to tell to Prince Oroontades: "The prince went to his bedroom and put himself to bed; he then had Tireus called to him, and having seats placed in the _ruelle_, he commanded us to sit," and then the story begins; and it goes on for pages; and when it is finished we observe that it was included in another story told by Araxe; wherefore, instead of finding ourselves back among the actors of the principal tale, we alight only among those in Araxe's narrative.[325] These stories are thus enclosed in one another like Chinese boxes. II. This literature as soon as imported into England realized there the most complete success. To find a parallel for it we must go back to the time when mediaeval Lancelot and Tristan were sung of by French singers, and afterwards by singers of all countries. Cyrus and Mandane, Oroontades and Tireus, Grand Scipio and Illustrious Bassa, Astree and Celadon, our heroes and our shepherds once more began the invasion and conquest of the great northern island. As was to be expected from such unparalleled conquerors, they accomplished this feat easily, and their work had consequences in England for which France can scarcely offer any perfect equivalent. Through their exertions there arose in this country a dramatic literature in the heroical style which, thanks especially to Dryden, has still a literary interest. But in France our heroes of fiction were curtailed of much of their glory by the inexorable Boileau. They left, it is true, some trace of their influence in the works of Corneille and even of Racine, but the heroic drama, properly so called, was restricted to the works of the Scuderys and Montchrestiens, which is saying enough to imply that it was not meant to survive very long.