has been given by Mr Hannay, is the main source of the French realistic and satiric romances, although the best of the latter excel their originals as paintings of manners and as humorous amusing stories. This does not, of course, apply to the imitation of Cervantes. Le Berger Extravagant is the work of an acute and interesting mind, but it will not bear comparison for a moment with Don Quixote. The deeper influence of that great work was not felt till a later period.
Setting aside Barclay's Latin Euphormio (1603) and D'Aubigné's Aventures du Baron de Fœneste (1617-20), which belong in the main to the satirical, fantastic, pedantic literature of the revival of learning, the first sketch of a realistic romance may be found in Théophile de Viau's Fragments d'une Histoire Comique, written probably about 1620, which, besides its biographic interest, is a fresh and taking picture, so far as it goes, of young men and their ways in the seventeenth century. But the most elaborate and conscious exponent of realism in opposition to the idealism of the heroic and pastoral romances was Charles Sorel (1599-1674), the author of the Histoire Comique de Francion[1] (1622, greatly enlarged in 1646), Le Berger Extravagant (1627), and Polyandre (1648).
Of Sorel's life we know next to nothing, though Guy Patin has left an interesting description of the "short, Sorel. fat man with long nose and short-sighted eyes." His earliest work was a conventional love romance, L'Orphise de Chrysante (1616), and some
- ↑ Nouvelle édition, &c., par Em. Colombey, Paris, 1858.
