e
special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even
here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in
_Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much
difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist
pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person
than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has
a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably
suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that
singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_
a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_
is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_,
and _facetiae_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the
time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine
downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a
working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than
_The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles
Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual
novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectae
membra _novellae_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads
it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet
come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint
vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost
completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque"
manner, it is abortive and only half organised.

The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is one
which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather
surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there
was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It
must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some
extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and
it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows
at once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and how
surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to
hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in
kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--we
cannot call i