Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told.

It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention.

The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.
At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediaeval variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.
Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have been revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in English.

For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind.

The unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it" which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as prominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel reader's demands.