There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalric
passions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of
all kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience. When La
Rochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines which
may be thus translated:
_To win that wonder of the world,
A smile from her bright eyes,
I fought my King, and would have hurled
The gods out of their skies_,
he was breathing the very atmosphere of the heroic novels. Their
extraordinary artificial elevation of tone was partly the spirit of
the age; it was also partly founded on a new literary ideal, the tone
of Greek romance. No book had been read in France with greater avidity
than the sixteenth-century translation of the old novel _Heliodorus_;
and in the _Polexandres_ and _Clelies_ we see what this Greek spirit
of romance could blossom into when grafted upon the stock of Louis
XIV.
The vogue of these heroic novels in England has been misstated, for
the whole subject has but met with neglect from successive historians
of literature. It has been asserted that they were not read in England
until after the Restoration.
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