These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. After Gray had studied the Norse mythology, we find him using such strong expressions as "iron-sleet of arrowy shower." Collins's ode on _The Passions_ contains seventeen personified abstractions, from "pale Melancholy" to "brown Exercise."
The conflict between these two schools continues; and many people still think that any poetry which shows polished regularity must be excellent. To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the magazines and glance at the current poetry, which often consists of words rather artificially strung together without the soul of feeling or of thought.
The Growth of Prose Fiction.--Authentic history does not take us back to the time when human beings were not solaced by tales. The _Bible_ contains stories of marked interest. _Beowulf_, the medieval romances, the _Canterbury Tales_, and the ballads relate stories in verse.
For a long time the knight and his adventures held the place of honor in fiction; but the time came when improbable or impossible achievements began to pall. The knight who meets with all kinds of adventures and rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in _Don Quixote_ by the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This world-famous romance shows by its ridicule that the taste for the impossible adventures of chivalry was beginning to pall. The following title to one of the chapters of _Don Quixote_ is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter LVIII.--Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in Such Numbers that they gave him No Breathing Time."
Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan Age. We have seen that Lyly's _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_ contain the germs of romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert Greene (1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), helped to give to Shakespeare the plots of two of his plays. Greene's novel _Pandosto_ suggested the plot of _The Winter's Tale_, and Lodge's _Rosalind_ was the immediate source of the plot of _As You Like It_.
Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His most popular stories deal with the passion of love as well as with adventure. He was also the pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the slums to study life at first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers and rascals of London and published his observations in a series of realistic pamphlets.
