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'another,' destroys the perspective of the story. We are listening to a
contemporary, not to an old man giving us his fading recollections of a
disreputable childhood.

The peculiar merit, then, of De Foe must be sought in something more
than the circumstantial nature of his lying, or even the ingenious
artifices by which he contrives to corroborate his own narrative. These,
indeed, show the pleasure which he took in simulating truth; and he may
very probably have attached undue importance to this talent in the
infancy of novel-writing, as in the infancy of painting it was held for
the greatest of triumphs when birds came and pecked at the grapes in a
picture. It is curious, indeed, that De Foe and Richardson, the
founders of our modern school of fiction, appear to have stumbled upon
their discovery by a kind of accident. As De Foe's novels are simply
history _minus_ the facts, so Richardson's are a series of letters
_minus_ the correspondents. The art of novel-writing, like the art of
cooking pigs in Lamb's most philosophical as well as humorous apologue,
first appeared in its most cumbrous shape. As Hoti had to burn his
cottage for every dish of pork, Richardson and De Foe had to produce
fiction at the expense of a close approach to falsehood. The division
between the art of lying and the art of fiction was not distinctly
visible to either; and both suffer to some extent from the attempt to
produce absolute illusion, where they should have been content with
portraiture. And yet the defect is balanced by the vigour naturally
connected with an unflinching realism. That this power rested, in De
Foe's case, upon something more than a bit of literary trickery, may be
inferred from his fate in another department of authorship. He twice got
into trouble for a device exactly analogous to that which he afterwards
practised in fiction. On both occasions he was punished for assuming a
character for purposes of mystification. In the latest instance, it is
seen, the pamphlet called 'What if the Pretender Comes?' was written in
such obvious irony, that the mistake of his intentions must have been
wilful. The other and better-known performance, 'The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters,' seems really to have imposed upon some of his readers.
It is difficult in these days of toleration to imagine that any one can
have taken the violent suggestions of the 'Shortest Way' as put forward
seriously. To those who might say that persecu