it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone
and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the
epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.
Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said
already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,
and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively
English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had
less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius
and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation
of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his
excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had
widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps
even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the
still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the
novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for
the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be
described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position
which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more
or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the
mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on
the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no
character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of
the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was
soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the
historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and
because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was
rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more
difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,
Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with
these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.

[6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_
first: but it has been so since.

Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice to
Ireland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or
demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the
fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson,