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270 come under the author's lash. In Polyandre, which remained unfinished, he began with the same realistic and satiric purpose a picture of middle-class life, a forerunner of Furetière's Roman Bourgeois.

The principal fault of Sorel's, as of wellnigh all these realistic novels, is that they want the romance interest entirely. The incidents may amuse, the pictures of manners and the satire instruct, but the pleasure proper of the novel is not given unless the centre of our interest be the character and fortunes of the hero and those with whom his fate is involved. The pastoral and heroic romances, despite their absurdities, succeeded in arousing suspense in their readers. This is the chief advance that d'Urfé's made on earlier pastoral romances; and there can be no doubt that lady readers at any rate followed the fortunes of Oroondate, of the illustrious Bassa, and of Cyrus with the same acute sympathy as a later generation felt for Pamela and Clarissa. No realistic romance of the seventeenth century, excepting Don Quixote and, perhaps, Le Roman Comique, has a hero for whose fate we care two straws.

We cannot do more than mention Lannel's Roman Satyrique (1624), whose chief interest was its personages déguisés; the striking La Chrysolite ou le Secret des Romans (1627) of André Mareschal, entitled by Koerting the first French psychological romance, which describes with unusual power a series of incidents, and traces these to their source in the character of the dramatis personæ; or the Page disgracié (1619, pub. 1640), an interesting