Romance & legend of chivalry

"FIVE hundred years after this date some New Zealand University Extension lecturer can tell how our generation had for its favourite reading the novels which to his age may seem tiresome and absurd, as spinning out the same story over and over again, introducing the same characters - the heart - conquering captain, the heroine who hardly knows her own mind, the scheming mother-in - law, the fox - hunting squire, the young man about town, the comic old aunt, the detective of preternatural sagacity, the unscrupulous speculator who commits suicide, and so forth, and so forth-always ending at the altar with what ought to be a happy marriage."