Chapter XXIV (3)

[600] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. ii., col. 558. It is remarkable
that Mr. Dunlop has been ignorant of Godwin’s claim to this work,
and takes Dominic Gonzalez for the real author. Hist. of Fiction,
iii. 394.

|Howell’s Dodona’s Grove.|

61. Though I can mention nothing else in English which comes exactly within our notions of a romance, we may advert to the Dodona’s Grove of James Howell. This is a strange allegory, without any ingenuity in maintaining the analogy between the outer and inner story, which alone can give a reader any pleasure in allegorical writing. The subject is the state of Europe, especially of England, about 1640, under the guise of animated trees in a forest. The style is like the following:--“The next morning the royal olive sent some prime elms to attend prince Rocolino in quality of officers of state; and a little after he was brought to the royal palace in the same state Elaiana’s kings used to be attended the day of their coronation.” The contrivance is all along so clumsy and unintelligible, the invention so poor and absurd, the story, if story there be, so dull an echo of well-known events, that it is impossible to reckon Dodona’s Grove anything but an entire failure. Howell has no wit, but he has abundance of conceits, flat and common-place enough. With all this he was a man of some sense and observation. His letters are entertaining, but they scarcely deserve consideration in this volume.

|Adventures of Baron de Fæneste.|

62. It is very possible that some small works belonging to this extensive class have been omitted, which my readers, or myself, on second consideration, might think not unworthy of notice. It is also one so miscellaneous that we might fairly doubt as to some which have a certain claim to be admitted into it. Such are the Adventures of the Baron de Fæneste, by the famous Agrippa d’Aubigné (whose autobiography, by the way, has at least the liveliness of fiction); a singular book written in dialogue, where an imaginary Gascon baron recounts his tales of the camp and the court. He is made to speak a patois not quite easy for us to understand, and not perhaps worth the while; but it seems to contain much that illustrates the state of France about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much in this book is satirical; and the satire falls on the Catholics, whom Fæneste, a mere foolish gentleman of Gascony, is made to defend against an acute Hugonot.