not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was
enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.
Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was
suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy
licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others
and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound
to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.

It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the
fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its
longer examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own way
sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to
imagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind,
must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there is
a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almost
Spenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphere
of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot
imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at
night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read
_Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly
not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and
unlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with them
conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the
kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did
not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were
being done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--that
their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,
in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress
on one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel could
enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even
exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at
all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it
did enter.

Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to
construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that
some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his
stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can