did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such
completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as
have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:
such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose
narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech
of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection
perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the
doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth
not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.

We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which
have been referred to above.

In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great
length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle
of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and
Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of
the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of
another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and
courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson
had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at
Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had
taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and
anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the
Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable
practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more
than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_
he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best
known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,
though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems
also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly
were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is
a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A
certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from
Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the
Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis
Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but
mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whos