Another collection of tales, several of which are from Giraldi Cinthio and other Italian fabulists, was given to the public by George Whetstone, in 1582, under the appellation of Heptameron, a term which had been rendered fashionable by the popularity of a suite of tales published at Paris in 1560, and entitled, "Heptameron des Nouvelles de la Royne de Navarre." Whetstone possessed no inconsiderable reputation in his day; he has been praised as a poet by Meres and Webbe, and his Heptameron, though written in prose, with only the occasional interspersion of poetry, had its share of contemporary fame, and the still greater celebrity of furnishing some portion of a plot to our great dramatic bard.[543:B]
The first volume of a large collection of Italian tales made its appearance at Paris in 1583, under the title of Cent Histoires
Tragiques. This work, the compilation of Francis de Belleforrest and Boisteau, was ultimately extended to seven volumes, and a part of it, if not the whole, appears, on the authority of the Stationers' Register, to have been translated into English, in 1596.[544:A] The edition, however, to which Warton alludes, must have been posthumous; for Belleforrest died on January 1st, 1583, and that he had printed selections from the Italian novellists long anterior, is evident from Painter's reference to them in the second volume of his Palace of Pleasure, dated 1567. Probably what the historian terms the "grand repository" commenced with the copy of 1583.[544:B]
Independent of these large prose collections of Italian tales, a vast variety of separate stories was in circulation from the same source; and many of our poets, such as Gascoigne, Turberville, &c.[544:C] amused themselves by giving them a metrical and sometimes a semi-metrical,
form. By these means the more rugged features of the Anglo-Norman romance, were softened down, and a style of fiction introduced more varied and more consonant to nature.
The taste, however, for the wild beauties of Gothic fabling, though polished and refined by the elegant imagination of the Italians, was still cultivated with ardour, and, towards the close of Elizabeth's reign, was further stimulated, by a fresh infusion of similar imagery, through the medium of the Spanish and Portuguese Romances.
These elaborate, and sometimes very interesting productions, are evidently constructed on the model of the Anglo-Norman romance, though with greater unity of design, and with more attention to morality. There is reason to believe, with Mr. Tyrwhitt, that neither Spain nor Portugal can produce a romance of this species older than the era of printing[545:A]; for the manuscript of Amadis of Gaul, which has been satisfactorily proved by Mr. Southey to have been the production of Vasco Lobeira, and written in the Portuguese language, during the close of the fourteenth century[545:B], was never printed, and is supposed to be no longer in existence; while the Spanish version of Garciordonez de Montalvo, the oldest extant, and which has, in general, passed for the original, did not issue from the press before the year 1510, the date of its publication at Salamanca.
This romance, beyond all doubt the most interesting of its [545:C]class, is well known as one of the very few in Don Quixote's library which escaped the merciless fury of the Licentiate and the Barber. "The first that master Nicholas put into his hands was Amadis de Gaul in four parts; and the priest said, 'There seems to be some mystery in this; for, as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry
printed in Spain, and all the rest have had their foundation and rise from it; and, therefore, I think, as head of so pernicious a sect, we ought to condemn him to the fire without mercy.'—'Not so, sir,' said the barber; 'for I have heard also, that it is the best of all the books of this kind; and therefore, as being singular in his art, he ought to be spared.'—'It is true,' said the priest, 'and for that reason his life is granted him.'"[546:A] Nor is the description which Sir Philip Sidney has given of the effects of Amadis on its readers less important than the encomium of Cervantes on its literary merit; "Truly," says the knight, "I have known men, that even with reading Amadis de Gaul, have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage."[546:B]
The introduction of Amadis into the English language took place in the year 1592, when the first four or five books were translated from the French version and printed by Wolfe.[546:C] It experienced the same popularity here which had attended its naturalisation in France, Italy, and Spain, and seems to have been in the zenith of its reputation among us at the close of the Shakspearean era; for Fynes Moryson, who published his Itinerary in 1617, in his directions to a traveller how to acquire languages, says, "I think no book better for his discourse than Amadis of Gaul; for the knights errant, and the ladies of courts, doe therein exchange courtly speeches, and these books are in all languages translated by the masters of eloquence;" and Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, written about the same period, mentions Amadis along with Huon of Bourdeaux, as one of the most fashionable volumes of his day. Such, indeed, is the merit of this romance, that the lapse of four hundred years has not greatly diminished its attractions, and the admirable version of Mr. Southey, which, by rejecting or veiling the occasional indelicacy of the original,