Excerpt from Heroes and Heroines of Fiction Roughly speaking, the year 1500 forms the line of cleavage between this volume and its predecessor bearing the subtitle, Modem Prose and Poetry. But no merely arbitrary date can fur nish a philosophical and consistent division between a volume so subtitled and a companion volume like the present, dealing not only with the characters of classic and oriental myth (these date from the unknown past), but also with heroes of the folk-lore, legend and tradition of all times and of that non-literary literature known as the ballad and the chapbook. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.