story is
_Oroonoko_ (1658), a tale of an African slave, which has been called
"the first humanitarian novel in English," and a predecessor of _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_.

Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century.--Defoe's
_Robinson Crusoe_ shows a great advance over preceding fiction. In the
hands of Defoe, fiction became as natural as fact. Leslie Stephen
rightly calls his stories "simple history minus the facts." Swift's
_Gulliver's Travels_ (1726) is artfully planned to make its
impossibilities seem like facts. _Robinson Crusoe_ took another
forward step in showing how circumstances and environment react on
character and develop the power to grapple with difficulties and
overcome them. Unlike the majority of modern novels, Defoe's
masterpiece does not contain a love story.

The essay of life and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth
century presents us at once with various pigments necessary for the
palette of the novelist. Students on turning to the second number of
_The Spectator_ will find sketches of six different types of
character, which are worthy to be framed and hung in a permanent
gallery of English fiction. The portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley may
even claim one of the places of honor on the walls.

Distinction between the Romance and the Modern Novel.--The romances
and tales of adventure which had been so long in vogue differ widely
from the modern novel. Many of them pay but little attention to
probability; but those which do not offend in this respect generally
rely on a succession of stirring incidents to secure attention. Novels
showing the analytic skill of Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_, or the
development of character in George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ would have
been little read in competition with stirring tales of adventure, if
such novels had appeared before a taste for them had been developed by
habits of trained observation and thought.

We may broadly differentiate the romance from the modern novel by
saying that the romance deals primarily with incident and adventure
for their own sake, while the novel concerns itself with these only in
so far as they are necessary for a faithful picture of life or for
showing the development of character.

Again, the novel gave a much more prominent position to that important
class of human beings who do the most of the world's work,--a type
that the romance had been inclined to neglect.

[Illustration: SAMUEL RICHARDSON. _From an original drawi