ESPEARE.

I.

In the works of Nash and his imitators, the different parts are badly
dovetailed; the novelist is incoherent and incomplete; the fault lies in
some degree with the picaresque form itself. Nash, however, pointed out
the right road, the road that was to lead to the true novel. He was the
first among his compatriots to endeavour to relate in prose a
long-sustained story, having for its chief concern: the truth. He
leaves to his real heroes, Surrey, More, Erasmus, Aretino, their
historical character, and he gives to his fictitious ones caprices and
qualities which make of them distinct and living beings like those of
every-day life. He gives us no more languid shepherds, no more romantic
disguises, no more pretended warriors whose helmets cover, as in
Ariosto, a woman's fair locks. His style is flexible, animated, suited
to the circumstances, free from those ornaments of language so sought
after in his time; no one, Ben Jonson excepted, possessed at that epoch,
in so great a degree as himself, a love of the honest truth. With Nash,
then, the novel of real life, whose invention in England is generally
attributed to Defoe, begins. To connect Defoe with the past of English
literature, we must get over the whole of the seventeenth century and go
back to "Jack Wilton," the worthy brother of "Roxana," "Moll Flanders,"
and "Colonel Jack."

But shepherds were not yet silenced, nor had romantic heroes spoken
their last. On the contrary, their best time was still to come; in the
seventeenth century they resumed their hardly interrupted speeches,
conversations, correspondence, exploits and adventures, and flourished
mightily in the world. We come to the time of the heroic romance and
heroic drama. The main originality of the romance literature in England
during this century was the increase and over-refinement of heroism in
works of fiction. For many among the reading public of that age,
Shakespeare was barbarous and Racine tame; but Scudery was the "greatest
wit" that ever lived.

This kind of writing was thus partially renovated through certain
superadded characteristics, the part allotted to "heroism" being the
foremost; but the groundwork was as old as the very origin of the
nation. For this new species of novel was mainly a development of the
old chivalrous romances of early and mediaeval times. These romances, as
we know, had continued in Elizabethan times to enjoy some reputation,
and under an altered shape