e that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most
part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion
with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in
verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably
from its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help:
but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no
possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not
matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and
the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _ad
eundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.

Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric
masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen
one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less
isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more
still eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-period
really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it
is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of persons born when others were still living who drew their first
breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very
distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a
popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has
continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.
Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that
appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out
of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there
exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I
dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into
scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would
certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over
the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public
libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make
out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains
certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom
"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a
book that is not a novel; for whom the nov