things total in themselves, but are woven into a larger narrative by
whose proportions they are dwarfed, so that their true completeness is
disguised. "He cares not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready
to beguile his reader with a Milesian story--one of those quaint and
witty interludes which have travelled the world over and become part,
not merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of
these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its decadence that
we owe the famous stories alluded to above.

To the Elizabethan period belong the most masterly translations of
which the English language is possessed; and this not by virtue of
their accuracy and scholarship, but because, to use Doctor Johnson's
words, the translator "exhibits his author's thoughts in such a dress
as the author would have given them had his language been English."
That same "indefatigable youthfulness" which converted courtiers into
sailors and despatched them into unknown seas to ransack new worlds,
urged men of the pen to seek out and to pillage, with an equal ardor
of adventure, the intellectual wealth of their contemporaries in other
lands and the buried and forgotten stores of the ancients upon their
own neighboring book-shelves. A universal and contagious curiosity
was abroad. To this age belong William Paynter's version of the
_Decameron_, entitled _The Palace of Pleasure_, 1566, from which
Shakespeare borrowed; Geoffrey Fenton's translation of Bandello's
_Tragical Discourses_, 1567; Sir Thomas North's rendering of
_Plutarch's Lives_, 1579; Thomas Underdowne's _Heliodorus_, 1587;
Thomas Shelton's _Don Quixote_, 1612; and others too numerous to
mention. It seems extraordinary at first sight that when such models
of advanced technique were set before them, Englishmen were so slow
to follow; for though Professor Baldwin is probably correct in his
analysis of the _Decameron_ when he states that, of the hundred tales,