wn capacity--by Defoe.
It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again
rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to
slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then
to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting
pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we
put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by
any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making
uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising
them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving
them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as
though they actually existed.

The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a
temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an
inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of
Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,
and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great
quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and
incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the
eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification
absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,
pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It
has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no
great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some
extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of
travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and
both close to Addison and Steele.

Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent
in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as
the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but
certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the
vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among
those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be
specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a
little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection
into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of
course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to