told in the bazaars of India, and other parts of the East, till they had become the common possession of the oriental imagination—were redacted into their Arabic form in the golden age of Arabic culture under the Caliphs of Bagdad. Meanwhile, in the European West, what literature there was-if we except heroic metrical legends of the Scandinavians and Germans of the continent, and a somewhat more various though still scanty vernacular literature among our insular AngloSaxons-consisted of writings, chiefly theological and historical, in the universal ecclesiastical Latin. Of this mediæval Latin literature of Europe, the portion most nearly approaching to Prose Fiction in its nature was that which consisted in the numberless legends of the Lives of the Saints-narratives, however, which were offered and read as history, and not as fiction. Prose Fiction, in fact, as we now understand it, reappeared in Europe only after the vernacular languages had pushed themselves publicly through the Latin, as the exponents, in each particular nation, of the popular as distinct from the learned thought; nor did it reappear even in these vernacular languages until they had well tried themselves first in other forms of literature, and especially in metrical forms. The outburst of

modern vernacular literature, simultaneously or nearly so, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the various European nations, was, it is needless to say, metrical; and the evolution of the prose forms out of their metrical beginnings took place by the same process as in the history of Ancient Literature,more rapidly, however, and with some obvious and striking exceptions, in consequence of the inheritance of so much of the prose literature of the ancients, and in consequence of the practice which some of the vernacular writers already had in Latin prose.

In the countries speaking the Romance tongues, or tongues derived from the Latin, the vernacular outburst took place, as all know, in two distinct jets or streams of Poetry-represented severally, in France, by the Lyric Poetry of the southern Troubadours, and the Narrative Poetry of the northern Trouveurs. Out of these two forms, both metrical, of early vernacular literature (and, doubtless, the same double tendency to the Lyric, on the one hand, and to the Narrative, on the other, is to be discerned in the contemporary efforts of the German Minnesingers) the various European literatures gradually developed themselves.

It was out of the Narrative Poetry of the Trouveurs, or out of whatever was analogous to that

elsewhere than in France, that the Prose Fiction might be expected most naturally to arise. And yet what do we see? Though the passion for narrative all over feudal Europe was something unprecedented; though the demand of the lords and ladies in their castles, of the peasants in their huts, and of the burghers in their households, was still for stories, stories; though, to satisfy this demand, the minstrels, and those who supplied them with their wares, invented, borrowed, translated, amplified and stole— now rehearsing known facts and genealogies, now collecting and shaping legends in which the facts and personages of Medieval History were worked into romances of chivalry, now catching up classic stories of the ancient world and reproducing Alexander as a knight-errant and Virgil as a great magician, now fetching a subject out of ecclesiastical lore, now adapting some Byzantine or Oriental tale which had been brought westward by the Crusades, now tasking their own powers of fancy for additions to the horrors of the popular Demonology, and now only telling comic and licentious tales of real life ;yet, with few exceptions, all this immense trade in narrative literature, so far as it was vernacular and not Latin, was carried on in verse. Even the Fabliaux or facetious tales of real life, were, in great

part, metrical. This was the kind of composition, however, which tended most naturally to prose; and, hence, besides that in all countries there must have been hundreds of very early fabliaux, passing from mouth to mouth as rude prose jocosities, we find that, in one country at least, the earliest form of classic prose fiction was after this type.

A peculiarity of Italy, as compared with other lands, was that, though the taste for the narrative as well as for the lyric kind of poetry was felt there as strongly as elsewhere, and influenced the rising vernacular literature, the historical conditions. of the country, in its transition through the middle ages, had not been such as to provide for that narrative taste a fund of material in the nature of a national legend or epic. Hence, in founding the modern literature of Italy, the genius of Dante employed itself, not on any national story, but on a theme wholly self-constructed, wide as the world physically, and morally as deep as the universal human reason; and, hence, when it chanced that, after Dante's poetry, and the passionate lyrics of Petrarch, the next demand of the Italian vernacular genius was for a work of prose fiction, the answer to the demand was the Decameron of Boccaccio (1313-1375). These short novels of gallantry

-collected from various sources and only invested by Boccaccio with the charms of his Italian style -may be regarded as the first noticeable specimens of finished prose fiction in the vernacular literature of modern Europe. The type of prose fiction which Boccaceio had thus introduced, and which may be called the Italian type, was continued, with some variations, by his Italian successors of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries-Sachetti, Cintio, &c.; but, early in this last century, a new style of fiction, the so-called Pastoral Romance, was introduced in Italy in the Arcadia of the Neapolitan Sannazaro.

In France, the earliest prose fictions, besides mere Fabliaux and romantic stories belonging to the common stock of the Trouveurs all over Europe, were versions of those tales of chivalry, relating to the exploits of Charlemagne and his peers, which, from the twelfth century onwards, formed the national epic of France. It was not till the fifteenth century that these had run their course, and that, to satisfy the tastes of the courtly classes of society, novelettes of gallantry, in imitation of those of Boccaccio, were introduced. Later still, France produced a perfectly original, and to this day almost unique, example of the fiction of satiric humour in