sual picaresque farrago of adventure,
unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together
with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to
some extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries to
give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and
sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but
occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no
trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such
thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The English
Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a
master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. They
are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a
scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread
which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads
themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching,"
over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand
_fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung
together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative
expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their
own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of
foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks
of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything
and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted
in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended
as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have
extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have
had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

[4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
never used in the actual story.

One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French
picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in
this English example. Furetiere honestly called his book _Roman
Bourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,
_Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward
trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we
do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can
give us the com