So runs the pleasing tale of Nicephorus. But alas! the relentless voice of modern research will have it that the real author was not the bishop at all, but a Sophist who lived in the third century of our era. Be it as it may, I for my part shall go on believing the old romantic tale until a better one is invented for the Sophist.
The work itself is called 'Ten Books of Aethiopian History,' for the first and last scenes are laid in Egypt, but it is better known by the name of its hero and heroine. Its popularity was immense, and it was soon translated into 'almost all languages.' Later Père Amyot published a version in French for Francis I., who was so delighted with the result that he made the translator abbé of Belozane. Racine tells us it was this ancient romance that first fired his imagination with the desire to write. His tutor discovered him absorbed in its contents, and snatching it from his hand angrily consigned it to the fire. Racine bought another copy, which suffered a like fate. But so strong a hold upon him had the story, that he purchased a third, and devoured it in secret, offering it to his master with a smile when he had thoroughly mastered its contents.
It seems that this ancient Greek romance was lost for many centuries. At the sack of Buda in 1526, however, a manuscript of it was discovered in the royal library, where it had once formed part of the vast library amassed by Matthias Corvinus, the great King of Hungary. Matthias is said to have 'spoken almost all the European languages,' so doubtless he had passed many a pleasant hour with the tale. This manuscript (others have since been discovered) was printed at Basel 'in officina Ioan Hervagii' in 1534, a small quarto printed with Greek types.[32]
That the early romances of chivalry possess a charm for the book-collector it is impossible to deny. They are 'a series of books,' writes Mr. John Ormsby, 'which, complete, would be a glory to any library in the world; which, in first editions, would now probably fetch a sum almost large enough to endow a college; and which . . . . is perhaps . . . . as worthless a set of books as could be made up out of the refuse novels of a circulating library.' Times without number they have been derided and decried, even in the days when they were popular. The curate of La Mancha was not the only one who disapproved of them. 'In our fathers tyme,' wrote old Roger Ascham, judging the flock by a few black sheep, 'nothing was red, but bookes of fayned cheualrie, wherein a man by redinge, shuld be led to none other ende, but onely to manslaughter and baudrye.' Possevino, a learned Jesuit and famous preacher of the sixteenth century, used to complain that for the last five hundred years the princes of Europe had read nothing but romances. René d'Anjou listened to his chaplain inveighing against Launcelot, Amadis, and the romances of which he was particularly fond; but, says Villeneuve, while respecting the preacher for his boldness, the king continued to read them, and even composed new volumes in imitation of them.[33]