t presence either of semi-poetic
phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what
Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a
"naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and parade
of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking
of which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_
fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.

Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,
we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though
inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the
accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,
the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which
really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on
in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had
actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in
English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of
the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a
distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That
this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its
central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:
that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.

CHAPTER III

THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN

It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely
inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the
lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do
with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen
to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be
quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and
competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne
abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point
perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they
bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to
write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the
son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at
Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued
wit