s carried on
by Addison and Steele some thirty years later. The character of Sir Roger
de Coverley is a real reflection of English country life in the eighteenth
century; and with Steele's domestic sketches in _The Tatler, The
Spectator_, and _The Guardian_ (1709-1713), we definitely cross the border
land that lies outside of romance, and enter the region of character study
where the novel has its beginning.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MODERN NOVEL. Notwithstanding this long history of
fiction, to which we have called attention, it is safe to say that, until
the publication of Richardson's _Pamela_ in 1740, no true novel had
appeared in any literature. By a true novel we mean simply a work of
fiction which relates the story of a plain human life, under stress of
emotion, which depends for its interest not on incident or adventure, but
on its truth to nature. A number of English novelists--Goldsmith,
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne--all seem to have seized upon the
idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have
developed it simultaneously. The result was an extraordinary awakening of
interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly
concerned with literature. We are to remember that, in previous periods,
the number of readers was comparatively small; and that, with the exception
of a few writers like Langland and Bunyan, authors wrote largely for the
upper classes. In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the
appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the
number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a
foremost place in English life and history. These new readers and this new,
powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper them. They cared
little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous Literary Club; and,
so far as they read fiction at all, they apparently took little interest in
the exaggerated romances, of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories
of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new
type of literature was demanded, this new type must express the new ideal
of the eighteenth century, namely, the value and the importance of the
individual life. So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different
way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common
life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French
Revolution, and were we