ted by John
Davies. The usual description of the heroine of a novel
has been taken to the letter by the engraver, who
represents Love sitting on her forehead, and lilies and
roses on her cheeks. Two suns have taken the place of
her eyes, her teeth are actual pearls, &c. 401

[Illustration: GEMINI.]

[Illustration: AN ELIZABETHAN SHEPHERDESS.]

The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare.

INTRODUCTION.

The London publishers annually issue statistics of the works that have
appeared in England during the year. Sometimes sermons and books on
theology reach the highest figures; England is still the England of the
Bible, the country that at the time of the Reformation produced three
hundred and twenty-six editions of the Scriptures in less than a
century, and whose religious literature is so abundant that to-day
twenty-eight volumes of the British Museum catalogue treat of the single
word Bible. When theology does not obtain the first rank, it holds the
second. The only writings that can compete with it, in the country of
Shakespeare, of Bacon and of Newton, are neither dramas, nor books of
philosophy nor scientific treatises; they are novels. Theology had the
supremacy in 1885; novels obtained it in 1887, 1888, and 1889. Omitting
stories written for children, nine hundred and twenty-nine novels were
published in England in 1888, and one thousand and forty in 1889. Thus
the conscientious critic who wished to acquaint himself with all of them
would have to read more than two novels and a half, often in three
volumes, every day all the year round, without stopping even on Sundays.

This passion for the novel which does not exist in the same degree in
any other nation, only acquired its full strength in England in the
eighteenth century. At that time English novels produced in Europe the
effect of a revelation; they were praised extravagantly, they were
copied, they were imitated, and the popularity hitherto enjoyed by the
"Princesse de Cleves," "Marianne," and "Gil Blas," was obscured for a
while. "I say that Anglicism is gaining on us," wrote d'Argenson; "after
'Gulliver' and 'Pamela,' here comes 'Tom Jones,' and they are mad for
him; who could have imagined eighty years ago that the English would
write novels and better ones than ours? This nation pushes ahead by
force of unrestricted freedom."[1]

Modern society had at length found the kind of literature wh