Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/284

264 or less expanded,—exemplary novels, as Cervantes called his,—stories of incidents in real life narrated with a moral purpose, but with very considerable realistic vividness and psychological skill. What he claims as the special merit of his work is their truth, in which respect he contrasts them with "ces Histoires fabuleuses, ces livres d'amour, ces Romans, ces Bergeries, ces Chevaleries et semblables fadaises." The incidents of some, as La Mémoire de Darie (1620) or Diotrèphe, Histoire Valentine (1624), may have been drawn from actual experience; of others, as Palombe ou La Femme Honorable (1624), which was republished in 1853, the source is probably to be discovered in Italian and Spanish "novelle." The last has points of contact with the story of Romeo and Juliet. Neither the religious romance, however, nor the political, of which an example was given in Barclay's Latin Argenis (1626), proved in any degree rivals to the romance of love and gallantry. D'Urfé successors were Jean-Ogier de Gombauld (1576-1666), Marin le Roy, Sieur de Gomberville (1600-1674), Gautier de Costes, Chevalier de la Calprenède (1609-1663), and Madeleine de Scudéry (1608-1701), as well as many lesser lights such as François de Molière and Pierre de Vaumorière. They did not follow d'Urfé in choosing the pastoral convention to set forth their ideals of heroism and refinement. The Astrée was the source of many pastoral and gallant love-plays; but the taste for the heroic and the historic, traceable to political