h Defoe or Richardson; but was there no work of the
kind in England before their time? had they to invent it all, matter and
method? It is not enough to say that the gift of observation and
analysis was inborn in the race, as shown already, long before the
eighteenth century, in the work of the dramatists, moralists and
philosophers. Had not the same gift already manifested itself in the
novel?

The truth is that the novel shed its first splendour during the age of
Elizabeth; but the glory of Shakespeare has overshadowed the multitude
of the lesser authors of his time, a multitude which included the early
novelists. While they lived, however, they played no insignificant part;
now they are so entirely forgotten that it will perhaps be heard with
some surprise that they were prolific, numerous, and very popular. So
great was the demand for this kind of literature that some succeeded in
making an income out of their novels. Their books went through many
editions for that age, many more than the majority of Shakespeare's
plays. They were translated into French at a time when even the name of
the great dramatist was entirely unknown to the French people. Lyly's
"Euphues," for example, went through five editions in five years; in the
same period "Hamlet" passed through only three, and "Romeo and Juliet"
through two editions. Not a line of Shakespeare was put into French
before the eighteenth century, while prose fictions by Nash, Greene, and
Sidney were translated more than a century earlier.

As in our own day, some of these novelists busied themselves chiefly
with the analysis of passion and refined emotion; others chiefly
concerned themselves with minute observation of real life, and strove to
place before the reader the outward features of their characters in a
fashion impressive enough to enable him to realize what lay below the
surface. Many of these pictures of manners and of society were
considered by contemporaries good likenesses, not the less so because
embellished. Thus, having served as models to the novelists, the men and
women of the day in their turn took as example the copies that had been
made from them. They had had their portraits painted and then tried hard
to resemble their counterfeit presentments. Lyly and Sidney embellished,
according to the taste of the age, the people around them, whom they
chose as patterns for the heroes of their novels; and as soon as their
books were spread over the country, f