incapable of so sustained an effort, for the nine. folio volumes of her works are often brilliant but always desultory, and her plays have no other plot, as she wittily and truly confesses, but that of passing away the time that hung heavy on the hands of their writer. But it was in courtly circles such as these that the romance of the day found its public; like the Elizabethan novel, its chief function was to supply an innocent and fanciful pastime for the very prolonged and unrelieved leisure of high-born ladies, who read the romances aloud, and drew from them laws and precedents for their own small courts of love.

There were other women, too, from the time of the later Stuarts onward, who wrote professionally, and not merely to add a grace to ennui. The first of these is one of those numerous writers whom Pope, with careless malevolence, has clamped firmly in the stocks of a single couplet, and left sitting until later students shall take the trouble to make their acquaintance and redeem them. Posterity is content to know that Astræa trod the stage loosely, and so she gets no credit for the merits of her novels. Yet these merits are real, for Mrs. Aphra Behn had passed her childhood in Surinam, where her father was governor; for some years after the Restoration she had lived at Antwerp as a Government agent; and it was on sundry experiences in these two places that she based her two best-known novels, published in 1698, after her death,-Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt. For making use of incidents of real life in the service of fiction at a time when the heroic romance was at the height of its vogue, she deserves all credit.

And yet it was no literary reform that she effected. Miranda, the heroine of The Fair Jilt, whose original, says Mrs. Behn's anonymous biographer, she had met at Antwerp, is a beautiful, accomplished, and very wicked woman, who in a brief career plans the murder of her sister, and gets three men severally condemned to death for crimes of which she has falsely accused them or to which she had instigated them. Yet through all this she retains the affection and admiration of some at least of her victims, and passes her later days in tranquil retirement, thanking Heaven for the afflictions that had "reclaimed her and brought her to as perfect a state of happiness as this troublesome world can afford." The character may well have been real, but the reality and interest fade out of it under the conventional literary treatment. For Miranda's language resembles that of the most high-souled of the heroic ladies, and the jargon about flames, darts, wounds, tortures, and cruel charmers obscures the sombre merits of the original theme. In this novel, as in Oroonoko, Mrs. Behn travels to new regions for her stories, but she takes with her the conventional diction and apparel. The story of Oroonoko, the love-lorn and magnanimous negro, of "very little religion" but "admirable morals," who meets a tragic death, belongs to a class of romance that flourished almost a century later, when Rousseau had given popularity to the philosophical ideas that underlie it. In this novel Mrs. Behn is one of the early precursors of the romantic revival, and finds her logical place in that movement. But her bold conduct of a simple story and her popularity with her contemporaries entitle

her also to claim a share in the attempt, faint and ineffective, that the later seventeenth century witnessed, to bring romance into closer relation with contemporary life. The attempt failed for the time, and when at last achievement came, and the rise of the great schools of English novelists with Richardson and Fielding at their head was rendered possible, it was not wrought by the professed writers of romance, but by the essayists and party writers of the reign of Anne, by Addison and Steele, by Swift and Defoe, who formed their style under influences remote enough from the high-flown impossibilities of the heroic romance.

Thus, just as the sixteenth century saw the decline of the older romances of chivalry, so the seventeenth saw the rise, decline, and fall of this later and less robust romantic development; the heroic romance died and left no issue. And the influence that the century exercised on the growth of prose fiction, the foundations it laid for the coming novel, are to be sought, not in the writers of romance, but in the followers of other branches of literature, often remote enough from fiction, in satirists and allegorists, newspaper scribes and biographers, writers of travel and adventure, and fashionable comic playwrights. For the novel least of all forms of literature can boast a pure extraction; it is of mixed and often disreputable ancestry; and the novelist derives his inspiration, as well as his material, not chiefly from the pages of his predecessors in the art, but from the life of his time and the literature that springs directly from that life, whether it be a broadside or a blue-book.

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CHAPTER V.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN NOVEL.

THE story of Antæus, who gained fresh strength from each fall to the earth that he suffered, might well be taken to typify the history of prose fiction. Flat on the ground, after the soaring flights of the heroic romance, gaining fresh vigour from the intimate realistic study of daily life and ordinary character, the novel began its career anew, and with the fairest prospect of success. For the seventeenth century, so poor in original prose fiction, had done much to prepare the way for it when it should arise. Literary activity had displayed itself in many new forms; the newspaper and political and religious controversy had trained up a reading public numbering scores of thousands; above all, an instrument had been prepared for the novelist in the shape of a new prose, invented and first practised for purposes of criticism, homiletic, and science, but easily available for vivid narration or realistic description unencumbered by the metaphorical apparatus of earlier prose-writing. The conditions, material and formal, for the success of the novel, were there by the beginning of the eighteenth

century, and awaited only the artist who should perceive them and avail himself of them. The immense and immediate popularity of the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, each of whom stumbled, as it were by accident, into the writing of prose fiction, serves to show how ready the public was to welcome and appreciate the new venture. The literary tendencies and developments of the previous century made it certain that that venture should be realistic, dealing with average contemporary life, and no new resuscitation of the thrice-worn themes of old romance; the eighteenthcentury school of fiction, that is, was inevitably a school of novelists.

For after the great school of imaginative writers of the golden age of English literature had passed away, the literary tendencies of the seventeenth century were all in favour of the novel. One or two lonely men of genius built the lofty rhyme or wove the brilliant tangles of the old poetic prose, but the general character of a century is to be estimated most truly from its lesser writers, and not from the visions of a Milton, or the fantasies of a Browne. The works of the lesser writers of the seventeenth century show the rise of a new spirit, foreign to the times of Shakespeare,—a spirit of observation, of attention to detail, of stress laid upon matter of fact, of bold analysis of feelings and free argument upon institutions; the microscope of the men of the Restoration, as it were, laying bare the details of daily objects, and superseding the telescope of the Elizabethans that brought the heavens nearer earth. No one word will finally describe it in its relation to knowledge it is the spirit

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