Thames" in the shape of allegory, little
moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of
ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment
of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing
to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather
better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the
writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His
characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they
are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has
exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller
tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to
remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite
for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown
antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new
kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain
that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play
lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But
the process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed and
widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further
step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had
suggested the periodical essay itself.

Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part
of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him
that is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only
these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:
indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English
Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate
and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been
mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--the
special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the
delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the
point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,
and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."

Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by
which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts
of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English