"Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those
who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would
probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_,
during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation
so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and
literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there
_is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has
become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that in
which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious
and try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.

It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand,
are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the
term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important
characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no
sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But
these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally
undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could
be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with
only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in
the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the
incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated
into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written
at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages
of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be
connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the
same process.

But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the
"Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest
difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement
of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no
alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more
successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description
even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,
nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited
as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here
there was "no allaying