gnedly _underlined_, as it were, to
show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion
generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average
conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and
thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost
impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,
though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue
in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like
that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of
action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the
first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,
as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow
itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the
desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of a
room-floor and not of a stage.

This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in
Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their
essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the
Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been
thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much
less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into
part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional
draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as
had never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be
said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of
such a novel as had never been written before.

But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to
the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and
Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was
a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as
men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the
_Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous
and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,
but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially
from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a
capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of
Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constan