A Wonder Book of Old Romance
F. J. Harvey Darton
Paperback
(Forgotten Books, May 19, 2012)
Introduction only that tales of this sort wasted time and seldom came to a point. He gave voice, in fact, to the criticism which would be made alike by the plain man and by the awakening poetic spirit of the Renaissance. The criticism was perfectly true, from a literary point of view. The older romances were for the most part of small poetic merit, while their construction was often ill-balanced and digressive. There is hardly one of the features dwelt upon by Chaucer which cannot be paralleled in them. Sir Topaz was a knight fair and gent ;so were Sir Guy, Sir Bevis, and the rest of them. He came to a wood where was many a wild beast, both buck and hare :those ferocious creatures pastured there, apparently, because the poet had to fill up a line somehow, much as the author of Sir Bevis, anticipating King Lear, was forced to help out his metre with rats and mice and such small deer. Sir Topaz wore a breech and eke a shirt ;his face was as white as the finest bread; he had a seemly nose :in like manner every detail of clothing, figure, and armour, relevant or irrelevant, is dwelt on in the old romances. He pricked overS ile and stone, in his quest for the elf-queen, with ea.se rapidity, and an absence of adventure; so too A mys journeys many days to seek A mylion, without,. sfe far ss the poet tells us, any accident or any ordinary occurrence of daily life except a feeling of great fatigue. But if the romances are as a whole lacking both in poetical feeling and in the deeper sort of humour, they are usually very good as stories.(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically importan