first
English novel in 1740, leading as it has to the present state of
affairs, may fairly be counted a most important event in the history
of our race. Nowadays ten thousand novels are published every year,
and for some of these is claimed the enormous circulation of half a
million copies.

There is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in
acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by
literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation--for
it can be styled nothing less--of the modern novel. In the seventeenth
century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of
prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued
to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D'Urfe
and La Calprenede, which English imitators and translators had been
quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The _Francion_ of Sorel and the
_Roman Bourgeois_ of Furetiere--the latter, published in 1666, of
especial interest to students of the English novel--had prepared the way
for the exact opposite to the heroic romance; namely, the realistic
story of every-day life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and
Defoe--each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction.
Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, _Robinson Crusoe_ and
_Gulliver's Travels_, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the
appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great
satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the
eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in
prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile
the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays
of the beginning and the comedies of the close of the seventeenth
century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their
craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and
women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit
of Congreve were now rather readers than play-goers, and were most ready
to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in
book form. In the playhouse they came to expect bustle and pantomime
rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a
domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and
apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great no