The _Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive.

Impotence and sterility in every sense could but be its portion.

Of the two great qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of variety and no life at all.

There is hardly anything to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that fiction before the public.

How far there may be any real, though metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a question not to be discussed here.