activity at home: there was no exploit of English valor, no extension of
English dominion and influence, which did not find its literary
reproduction. Thus, while it was an age of historical research, it was
also that of actual delineations of curious novelties at home and abroad.

Poetry was in a transition state; it was taking its leave of the unhealthy
satire and the technical wit of Queen Anne's reign, and attempting, on
the one hand, the impostures of Macpherson and Chatterton,--to which we
shall hereafter refer,--and, on the other, the restoration of the pastoral
from the theatrical to the real, in Thomson's song of the Rolling Year,
and Cowper's pleasant Task, so full of life and nature. Swallow-like,
English poetry had hung about the eaves or skimmed the surface of town and
court; but now, like the lark, it soared into freer air--

Coetusque vulgares et udam
Spernit humum fugiente penna.

In short, it was a day of general awakening. The intestine troubles
excited by the Jacobites were brought to an end by the disaster of
Culloden, in 1745. The German campaigns culminating at Minden, in 1759,
opened a door to the study of German literature, and of the Teutonic
dialects as elements of the English language.

It is, therefore, not astonishing that in this period Literature should
begin to arrange itself into its present great divisions. As in an earlier
age the drama had been born to cater to a popular taste, so in this, to
satisfy the public demand, arose English _prose fiction_ in its peculiar
and enduring form. There had been grand and desultory works preceding
this, such as _Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress_, and Swift's
inimitable story of _Gulliver_; but the modern novel, unlike these, owes
its origin to a general desire for delineations of private life and
manners. "Show us ourselves!" was the cry.

A novel may be defined as a fictitious story of modern life describing the
management and mastery of the human passions, and especially the universal
passion of love. Its power consists in the creation of ideal characters,
which leave a real impress upon the reader's mind; it must be a prose
_epic_ in that there is always a hero, or, at least, a heroine, generally
both, and a _drama_ in its presentation of scenes and supplementary
personages. Thackeray calls his _Vanity Fair_ a novel without a hero: it
is impossible to conceive a novel without a heroine. There must also be a
_denouement_, or c