the
country where they lived and died, and whatever their station in
society.

How would this tale have been told in the eighteenth century by the
author of 'Robinson Crusoe'? by the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe'? by the
author of 'Tom Jones'? by the author of 'Tristram Shandy'? How would it
have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to
it, or Thackeray? How would it be presented now in the twentieth century
if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James? We need not
ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the
Shepardson-Grangerford episode of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he could bring
out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the
humorous realist who was the son of the town drunkard. Nor have we to
inquire how it would have presented itself to Erckmann-Chatrian, because
the Alsatian collaborators made it their own in the somber pages of the
'Rantzau.'

It is not rash to assume that Defoe would have set up rival shopkeepers,
one with a son and the other with a daughter; and he would have
delighted in accumulating the minutest details of the daily life of the
competing tradesmen. The fathers would have been sturdy Englishmen, both
of them, obstinate and pious; and the preaching of a sound morality
would never have been neglected. The narrative would purport to be
truth; and probably it would be credited to the pen of one of the
partisans, setting down in the first person a conscientious record of
what he had seen with his own eyes. But if Richardson had wisht to make
our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he
would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe's
method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of 'Pamela'
felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the
letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to
Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse. The tenser the tragic gloom, the
more voluminous these letters would become, the more self-analytical,
and at the same time, the more pathetic. If Fielding had selected this
story as the basis of a prose-epic we should have a masterly structure,
perhaps distorted by an undue insistence upon Romeo's youthful intrigue
with Rosaline. And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic
tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet's parents, with
all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and a