Equally difficult would it be to establish a general charge of moral enervation. England is justly proud of the stimulus to heroic self-sacrifice and endeavour which is afforded by her national records of golden deeds. Yet it must be remembered that, for at least half the world, the great actors and seenes of prose fiction are more real and familiar than those of history. English novels, as wel) as English history, teach by examples. They are not necessarily "schools of vice.'' Compounded, as Caxton says, of "chivalry curtosye, humanyte, hardynesse, love, cowardice, murder, vertuc, and syne,"' they may equally entice to virtue. In the Elizabethan age, for instance, romances might turn the brain of Don Quixote or drive a chambermaid to resolve ''to runne out of herself and become a lady-errant." Yet the same books stirred more balanced minds to heroic action. They made points of honour a religion, sometimes a, superstition.
Sir Philip Sidney had a poor opinion of "Amadis of Gaul;" yet he had known men who, even from reading that book, had found their harts mooned to the exercise of courtesies, liberalitie, and especially courage.' Men of action are generally silent as to their mental processes. But it was on romances of chivalry that the imagination of the generations, young as well as old, who hailed the accession of Elizabeth had been nourished. The old medieval favourites glow in the lines of Spenser's "Faerie Queene they colour Sidney's prose poem of the "Arcadia they irradiate the plays of Shakespeare. It would be strange indeed if they were not also translated into action.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.