owards it, which
has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.
Mrs. Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the form
of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the
key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.
And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work
testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose
fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be
treated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of the
first class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian
and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a
fashion to which there are few exact parallels.

A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a
certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as
literature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_
by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on
the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world
was to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--at
once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary
romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian
Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the
Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as
potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand
Pophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet
Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the
exercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so much
satiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at least
supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" book
both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very
amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save
historically.

[8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a
good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.

The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic
attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more
ways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment and
evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bo