mortification of witnessing the utter discomfiture of | after it had been given up by Swift. She was the his friends. daughter of Sir Roger Manley, governor of Guernsey.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE GREAT NOVELISTS.

§ 1. History of Prose Fiction. The Romance and the Novel. § 2. DANIEL DEFOE. His life and political career. §3. Robinson Crusoe. § 4. Defoe's other works. § 5. SAMUEL RICHARDSON. Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. § 6. HENRY FIELDING. His life and publications. § 7. Characteristics of his writings. Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Tom Jones, and Amelia. § 8. TOBIAS SMOLLETT. His life and publications. § 9. Characteristics of his novels. Compared with Fielding. § 10. LAWRENCE STERNE. Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. § 11. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. His life and publications. § 12. Criticism of his works. The Traveller and The Deserted Village. The Vicar of Wakefield. The Good Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer.

§ 1. Most departments of literature were cultivated earlier in England than that of Prose Fiction. We have, it is true, the romantic form of this kind of writing in the Arcadia of Sidney, and the philosophical form in the Utopia and the Atlantis; but the exclusive employment of prose narrative in the delineation of the passions, characters, and incidents of real life was first carried to perfection by a constellation of great writers in the eighteenth century, among whom the names of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith, are the most brilliant luminaries. Originally appearing, as do all types of literature, in a poetical form, the rhymed narratives of chivalry, poured forth with such inexhaustible fertility by the Trouvères of the Middle Ages, were in course of time remodelled and clothed in prose, and in their turn gave birth to the long, pompous, and unnatural romances of the time of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., which formed the principal light reading of the higher classes. In the Grand Cyrus, the Astrée, and the Princesse de Clèves, a class of writers of whom D'Urfé, Scudéri, Calprenède, and Madame de la Fayette, may be considered the types, imitated in descriptions of the adventures of classically-named heroes, the lofty, heroic, stilted language and sentiments which they borrowed from the Castilian writers. The absurdities and exaggerations of this kind of story naturally produced a reaction; and Spain and France gave birth to the Comic Romance originally intended as a kind of parody of the superhuman elevation and hair-splitting amorous casuistry of the popular fictions. Don Quixote was in this way as much a caricature of Montemayor as the Roman Comique of Scarron of the Clélie, or Grand Cyrus. In England, where the genius of the nation is eminently practical, and where the immense development of free institutions has tended to encourage individuality of character, and to give importance to private and domestic life, the literature of Fiction speedily divided into two great but correlative branches, to which our language alone has

given specific and distinct appellations - the Romance and the Novel. Both these terms are indeed ultimately derived, like the things they represent, from the nations of the South; the former originally signifying the dialect of the Trouvères and Troubadours, and thence, by a natural transition, that species of narrative fiction which was most abundantly produced in the dialect: the second, the Novella, Nouvelle, or short amusing tale, of which such a multitude of examples are to be found in the Italian, Spanish, and French literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will be sufficient merely to mention the Decamerone of Boccaccio and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of Marguerite of Navarre. This latter, the lighter or more comic form of narrative, is a type traceable ultimately to the Fabliaux of the old Provençal poets. But in modern English the Romance and the Novel both express varieties of prose and fiction of considerable length and elaborateness of construction: the former word indicating a narrative, the characters and incidents of which are of a lofty, historical, or supernatural tone, while the latter expresses a recital of the events of ordinary or domestic life, generally of a contemporary epoch. It is the latter department in which English writers, from the time of its first appearance in our literature down to the present time, have encountered few rivals and no superiors. § 2. The founder of the English Novel is DANIEL Defoe (1661–1731), a man of extraordinary versatility and energy as a writer, and one of the most fertile authors of narrative and controversial productions; for his complete works are said to comprise upwards of two hundred separate writings. His life was agitated and unfortunate. He was the son of a butcher in London, and by family as well as personal sympathies an ardent Whig and Dissenter. Indeed, he was educated for the ministry in a dissenting sect, but embraced a mercantile career, having at various periods carried on the business of a hosier, a tilemaker, and a woollen-draper. But his real vocation was that of a writer, and the ardor with which he maintained, in innumerable pamphlets, the principles of constitutional liberty, not only distracted his attention from his commercial pursuits, but exposed him, in those evil times, to repeated persecutions from the Government. He carried his devotion to Protestant principles so far, as to join the abortive insurrection under the Duke of Monmouth, though from this danger he escaped with impunity. He was at different times punished on charges of sedition, with all the inhuman brutality of those days, having been exposed in the pillory, sentenced to have his ears cut off, severely fined, and on two occasions imprisoned in Newgate, his confinement on one occasion extending to nearly two years. Nothing, however, could daunt or silence this indefatigable champion of liberty, and he continued to pour forth pamphlet after pamphlet, full of irony, logic, and patriotism. Among the most celebrated of his works in this class are his Trueborn Englishman, a poem in singularly tuneless rhymes, but full of strong sense and vigorous argument, in which he defends William of Orange and the Dutch against the prejudices of his countrymen, the Hymn to the Pillory, and the famous pamphlet The Shortest

Way with the Dissenters, in which, to show the folly and cruelty of the recent Acts persecuting the Sectarians, he with admirable sarcasm adopts the tone of a violent persecutor, and advises Parliament to employ the stake, the pillory, and the halter, with unrelenting severity. The mask of irony is so well worn in this pamphlet, that it was at first considered a serious defence of the parliamentary measure, and when the trick was discovered the fury of the dominant party knew no bounds. The purely political career of Defoe was, generally, from 1687 to 1715; and it was during one of his imprisonments that he carried on the Review, a literary journal which may be regarded as the prototype of our modern semi-political, semi-literary periodicals. It appeared thrice a week, and was written with great force and ready vigor of language. During the negotiations which preceded the union of Scotland to the British crown, Defoe was employed as a confidential agent in Edinburgh, and acquitted himself with ability. He afterwards published a narrative of that important event. Defoe's mercantile speculations were so unfortunate that he says in one of his poems,

"Thirteen times have I been rich and poor;"

and he probably employed the unequalled facility of his pen in fiction, principally as a means of supplying daily bread to his family, to which he was tenderly attached.

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§ 3. In 1719 Defoe published the first part of Robinson Crusoe, the success of which, among that comparatively humble class of readers which Defoe generally addressed, was instantaneous and immense. Indeed, if perfect originality in the plan, and the highest perfection in the execution of a fiction, be sufficient to establish a claim of creative genius, Defoe must be regarded as a creative genius of no common order. The primary idea of Robinson Crusoe may have been derived from the authentic narrative of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had been marooned, as the term then was, by his captain on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, where he passed several years in complete solitude. Selkirk, who, by a most singular coincidence, was taken off the island by the very same captain - Woods Rogers · who had abandoned him there, published on his return to England an account of his sufferings and adventures. By this narrative he appears to have gradually descended to the condition, if not of a wild beast, at least of a savage very little superior in intelligence; for when discovered he had almost entirely lost the use of language, which he only obtained again after a considerable time. The intense interest of Robinson Crusoe partly arises from the simplicity and probability of the events, the unforeseenness of many of which completely annihilate the reader's suspicion of the truth of what he is perusing, the skill with which Defoe identifies himself with the character of his Recluse, who is always represented as a commonplace man, without any pretensions to extraordinary knowledge or intelligence. He is, therefore, just such a person as every reader, ignorant or cultivated, old or young, can thoroughly sympathize with, and can fancy, while reading of his difficulties and embar

rassments, setting about remedying them, as he himself would do, under similar circumstances. Thus Robinson Crusoe is never endowed with more ingenuity or forethought than the generality of mankind; and thus, for example, when he cuts down a huge tree and after incredible labor shapes it into a boat, he finds that it is too heavy for him to launch. It is evident that the majority of readers acutely sympathize with this, because ninety-nine out of a hundred feel that they would be likely to commit a similar oversight. It is perhaps somewhat injurious that this book is generally read when we are very young; for the impressions it leaves

upon the memory and the imagination, among the strongest that we can

recall, are so deep and permanent that we do not return to the work when increased intellectual development would make us better able to appreciate Defoe's wonderful art. The raft, the goats, the dog, cats, and parrots, the palisaded fortification, the cave, the wrecked ships, the circumnavigation of the island, the fishing, turtle-catching, and planting of corn; every scene, every episode, is indelibly fixed upon the mind. It would be difficult to guess how many boys Robinson Crusoe has turned into sailors, or how many projects of living with a faithful Friday in a desert island, have been generated in childish fancies by this incomparable tale. The second part, which the success of the first encouraged Defoe to produce, is manifestly inferior to the first: indeed the moment the solitude of the island is invaded by more strangers than Friday, the charm is evidently diminished. Scott has well remarked that a striking evidence of Defoe's skill in this kind of fiction is the studiously low key, both as regards style and incidents, in which the whole is pitched. Defoe's object was not to instruct, but to amuse; to captivate that mysterious faculty by which we identify ourselves with imaginary events; and this he most successfully did by imitating not only the plain, straightforward, unaffected narratives of the old navigators, but their simple, idiomatic, unadorned diction.

§ 4. Among Defoe's numerous other works of fiction may be mentioned the Memoirs of a Cavalier, supposed to have been written by one who had taken part in the great Civil War; in which many historical facts are dressed up with that intense personal reality which Defoe knew so well how to communicate, and which made Lord Chatham cite the book as an authentic narrative. A not less remarkable narrative is the Journal of the Great Plague in London, where the imaginary annalist, a respectable London shopkeeper, a character which Defoe assumed with consummate skill,—describes the terrible sights of that fearful time. The air of verisimilitude in this book is so complete, that grave medical and statistical writers have quoted it as authentic; and it is only the application of the tests of modern science that have proved it to be a tissue of inventions in which the devastation caused by the scourge is most enormously exaggerated. Nothing can exceed the quiet yet not unpicturesque vividness with which episodes of the city life during the great calamity are set before us, and in some passages, as in the description of the maniac fanatic Solomon Eagle, the Great Pit in Aldgate, and the long line of anchored ships stretching