e, in its first great development, should be considered as
comprised within the dates 1740 and 1766; and it may not be
uninstructive, before entering into any critical examination of the
separate authors, to glance at this chronological list of the first
fifteen great works of English fiction.

The novels contained in the catalogue just given, however widely they
differed from one another in detail, had this in common: that they dealt
with mental and moral phenomena. Before 1740 we possessed romances,
tales, prose fiction of various sorts, but in none of these was essayed
any careful analysis of character or any profound delineation of
emotion. In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on
with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just
mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in
any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very
slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish
novel of _Oroonoko_.

The first great English novelist, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), was
born and bred in Derbyshire. He records of himself that when still a
little boy he had two peculiarities: he loved the society of women best,
and he delighted in letter-writing. Indeed, before he was eleven, he
wrote a long epistle to a widow of fifty, rebuking her for unbecoming
conduct. The girls of the neighborhood soon discovered his insight into
the human heart, and his skill in correspondence, and they employed the
boy to write their love-letters for them. In 1706 Richardson was
apprenticed to a London printer, served a diligent apprenticeship, and
worked as a compositor until he rose, late in life, to be master of the
Stationers' Company. He was fifty years of age before he showed symptoms
of any higher ambition than that of printing correctly acts of
Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the publishers,
Rivington and Osborne, urged him to compose for them a volume of
_Familiar Letters_, afterward actually produced as an aid to illiterate
persons in their correspondence. Richardson set about this work, gave it
a moral flavor, and at last began to write what would serve as a caution
to young serving-women who were exposed to temptation. At this point he
recollected a story he had heard long before, of a beautiful and
virtuous maid-servant who succeeded in marrying her master; and then,
laying the original design aside, Richardson, workin