prepare for heaven. Of course this is
fiction only in seeming and by courtesy, almost as far removed
from the Novel as the same author's mammoth dictionary or Lives
of the Poets. It has Richardson's method of moralizing, while
lacking that writer's power of studying humanity in its social
relations. The sturdy genius of Dr. Johnson lay in quite other
directions.

Richardson's sentimentality, too, was carried on by MacKenzie in
his "Man of Feeling" already mentioned as the favorite
tear-begetter of its time, the novel which made the most prolonged
attack upon the lachrymosal gland. But it is only fair to this
author to add that there was a welcome note of philanthropy in
his story--in spite of its mawkishness; his appeal for the under
dog in great cities is a forecast of the humanitarianism to
become rampant in later fiction.

Again, the seriousness which has always, in one guise or the
other, underlain English fiction, soon crystalized in the
contemporary eighteenth century novelists into an attempt to
preach this or that by propaganda in story-form. William Godwin,
whose relations as father-in-law to Shelley gives him a not
altogether agreeable place in our memory, was a leader in this
tendency with several fictions, the best known and most readable
being "Caleb Williams": radical ideas, social, political and
religious, were mooted by half a dozen earnest-souled authors
whose works are now regarded as links in the chain of
development--missing links for most readers of fiction, since
their literary quality is small. In later days, this kind of
production was to be called purpose fiction and condemned or
applauded according to individual taste and the esthetic and
vital value of the book. When the moralizing overpowered all
else, we get a book like that friend of childhood, "Sanford and
Merton," which Thomas Day perpetrated in the year of grace 1783.
Few properly reared boys of a generation ago escaped this
literary indiscretion: its Sunday School solemnity, its
distribution of life's prizes according to the strictest moral
tests, had a sort of bogey fascination; it was much in vogue
long after Day's time, indeed down to within our own memories.
Perhaps it is still read and relished in innocent corners of the
earth.. In any case it is one of the outcomes of the movement
just touched upon.

At present, being more ennuye in our tastes for fiction than
were our forefathers, and the pretence of piety being less a
c