Meanwhile French prose-writing, which had been of such easy simplicity in Montaigne, passed for a while under the bad influence of the Spanish _estilo culto_, and of the English Euphuism. This was the day of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and of the Précieuses, with their finical refinements and affectations of speech. In the subject-matter of literature the Spanish influence showed itself first in the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé (1608), a wearisome and unnatural “pastoral romance,” prompted by the _Diana_ of the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor. To this work are to be affiliated the “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who are shortly to be mentioned. As for the prose vehicle itself, apart from these vagaries of its use, it may be said that, ever since French literature reached its golden age in the middle of the seventeenth century, its characteristics have been much the same as those of French verse, namely, clearness of order, precision of statement, good sense of thinking, a triumph of reasonable and exact expression. Our own literature of the later part of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier half of the eighteenth, which owes so much to France, is nowhere more manifestly indebted than in respect of that lighter prose which takes the shape of letters and novels, and of what would now be called occasional journalism. The French have always been excellent letter-writers and journalists, as well as admirable novelists. Even the inferior French work, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s interminable pseudo-romantic prolixities—the _Grand Cyrus_, or _Clélie_ with its _Carte de Tendre_—and those of La Calprenède (_Cléopâtre_ and _Cassandre_), was reproduced in England by writers of the calibre of Mrs. Aphra Behn, as well as exploited by Dryden and other post-Restoration dramatists. The novel of adventure, which we associate with the names of Defoe (as in _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_), Fielding (_Joseph Andrews_), and Smollett (_Roderick Random_), and which is known as “picaroon” or “picaresque,” is no doubt ultimately derived from Spain, but its way into England was made through Paul Scarron, a French seventeenth-century novelist, and through his followers and literary heirs, among whom in the early eighteenth century is the renowned Lesage, the author of _Gil Blas_. On the other hand, that class of fiction which deals with character and its analysis, and which appears in English with Richardson, the author of _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Pamela_, dates from Madame de la Fayette, who lived a century earlier than he, although it is perhaps to his contemporary Marivaux that the Englishman is more directly under obligation. The first great exemplar of modern letter-writing, who, after Cicero and Pliny, taught Horace Walpole and Chesterfield how to pen epistles, and who inspired the more or less mock correspondence of Addison in the _Spectator_, was Madame de Sévigné, a contemporary of Madame de la Fayette.