Romance and Legend of Chivalry

p.1 "Five hundred years after this date some New Zealand University Extension lecturer can tell how our generation had for its favourite reading the novels which to his age may seem tiresome and absurd, as spinning out the same story over and over again, introducing the same characters--the heart-conquering captain, the heroine who hard knows her own mind, the scheming mother-in-law, the fox-hunting squire, the young man about town, the comic old aunt, the detective of preternatural sagacity, the unscrupulous speculator who commints suicide, and so forth, and so forth--always ending at the altar with what ought to be a happy marriage. Five hundred years ago our forbears delighted in romances which we are apt to consider insufferably tedious, and which even in the day of Cervantes had fallen into such disrepute that most of them were pronounced fit to be tossed out of the window by the priest and the barber of Don Quixote's village. So taste changes from century to century; and the pages over which the Middle Ages wept and smiled are for us like the "snows of yesteryear"...The history of these heroes had been songs sung by minstrels kept at the court of great lords, or wandering from castle to castle to entertain knights who for the moment were not engaged int he business of slaughtering man or beast. Still earlier they might have been legends or myths drifting about the world with the transmigrations of its peoples. much vain controversy has been waged as to whether the tales of chivalry were in origin classical, Scandinavian, Arabian, or what not. The more we look into the matter by the light of comparative mythology the more we find constant resemblances in all popular fiction, resemblances too many and too close to be always accidental."