_The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued.

The Greek romances also had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good deal of attention to Greek.

Then, when that century itself was on its way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scudery productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and something of a new turn.

The actual translations of French and Spanish romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with them here.

A bare list would fill a chapter.