I think Sir Walter Raleigh is quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the _Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.
The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency.

It was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back.

It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought.

Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period of the literature to which it belonged.

The pure mediaeval romance of chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left.