the book stands--accidentally
this time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from the
talk-deluged romances of the Scudery type. Whether Defoe actually knew
it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and
in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here
before him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant
thing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Of
course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is
actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of
the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect
makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that
Neville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal
(one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.

Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that
requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales
than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five
small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends
Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and
their beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed
accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where
the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other
stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either
said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the
exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being
Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not
appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,
such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is
no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude
of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,
but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not
yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.

It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but
over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:
but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning
of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the
relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the