And these _novelle_ became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the middle of the sixteenth century.

Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_ (1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single and collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers, contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.
For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects.

But they very soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the second position as representing the popular literature of the Elizabethan time.

And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of _Euphues_.

This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered.