[The English Novel by George Saintsbury]@TWC D-Link bookThe English Novel CHAPTER II 17/69
_The Famous History of Montelion, the Knight of the Oracle_ (1633 ?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of the century.
I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal duller than _Parismus_.
And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read _Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's copy.
I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would go much lower. [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W. Thackeray_. _Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607 ?), on the other hand--his second or third book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last chivalric type.
There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650.
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