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of the much discussed affair of the Italian lawyer, Francis Spiera who, on his death bed, left the Lutheran Church, and recast them into a conyenient narratiye. Twenty years later Martin Kromer, the famous bishop, theologian and historian, passed under review the sad adventures of John, Prince of Finland, and his wife, Princess Catherine, the victims of the persecution of the mad King of Sweden.

These facts compel the student of the 16-th century novel in Poland to treat the subject of his inyestigation without any attention to the literary form in which the stories were cast, for the writers of the period evidently did not trouble about the de-mands of ancient poetics. In particular they did not discriminate between prose and yerse forms, employing either of them with-out any cogent reason. They liked to yersify the prose stories, they even applied this method to the stories which had been translated into Polish, and, at the same time, they would go so far as to resolye into prose the Polish poems with which they happened to meet. The most striking example of such a practice may be found in two stories from the »Decamerone«. An ano-nymous scribe read the Polish yersion in prose of »Patient Grris-sil«, he liked it and recast it into yerse, »because rhymed lines read morę pleasantly«. About the same time, B. Budny applied the reyerse practice to the story of Bernabó of Genoa, that is he took the anonymous Polish text, in yerse, of this tale and turned it into a smooth prose.

Carrying out this principle of diyision, we may suryey the whole field of the Polish novel in the 16-th century in six groups: A) the pseudo-historical romance, B) the heroic romance, C) the moralising romance, _D) the comic romance, E) the reli-gious romance, and, finally, F), the miscellaneous romance, embrac-ing noyels and stories on yarious subjects, taken partly from ancient epics, partly from the Italian »noyelle«, partly from other sources of Renaissance literaturę. The following survey of these groups will proyide an idea of their composition, their literary and other sources, and the degree of their popularity in Polish literaturę.

A. The group of the pseudo-historical romance which, roughly speaking, may be compared with the »matiere de Romę la grant« in French medieyal literaturę, consists of five works. First of