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I have said that I can read Parismus for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and unlemoned barley-water in books of the Parthenissa class. If with them conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the kind go-between Sleep.
And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the "contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain Pollipus "a man of his hands" if ever there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her.
If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat, but my heart beat with it was it my fault? Did I plant the propensity there? Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature? When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England, were handed around the school, were they not all purchased with my own pocket-money?
I should imagine that in extenso it was a good deal duller than Parismus. And of course the comparative praise which has been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what it is a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural."
In fact the verse and prose romances of the time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's Pharonnida far the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or drama was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny prose Eromena. But Ornatus and Artesia, if more modern, more decent, and less extravagant than Parismus, is nothing like so interesting to read.
I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty; but from the best of motives; and therefore shall make her no apology for it when she returns back: 'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself, of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the younger affirm, 'That he never read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it. The stories of Greece and Rome, run over without this turn and application, do less service, I affirm it, than the history of Parismus and Parismenus, or of the Seven Champions of England, read with it.
The books of amusement read in these schools, including the first-mentioned in this list, were, the Seven Champions of Christendom, the Seven Wise Masters and Mistresses of Rome, Don Belianis of Greece, the Royal Fairy Tales, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Valentine and Orson, Gesta Romanorum, Dorastus and Faunia, the History of Reynard the Fox, the Chevalier Faublax; to these I may add, the Battle of Auhrim, Siege of Londonderry, History of the Young Ascanius, a name by which the Pretender was designated, and the Renowned History of the Siege of Troy; the Forty Thieves, Robin Hood's Garland, the Garden of Love and Royal Flower of Fidelity, Parismus and Parismenos; along with others, the names of which shall not appear on these pages.
The name of his first heroine, with the essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as that of one of Sidney's heroines in the Arcadia, which had been not long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs. Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of Parismus.
If anybody cannot read Amadis itself, he certainly will not read Parismus: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original perhaps not even everybody who can manage Palmerin could put up with Ford's copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would go much lower.
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