his Tanagra figurines.

Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin
and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale
took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself
a _chanson de geste_. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might win
immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was
long after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long,
achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In
his study of Balzac, Brunetiere recorded the significant fact that
no novelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the
French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence. And the
same acute critic, in his "History of Classical French Literature,"
pointed out that French novels were under a cloud of suspicion even so
far back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of years
thereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French literature
esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it.

Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy was
discussed only too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules for
it, which were not a little cramping. Another French critic, M. Le
Breton, in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in the
first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption
from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since the
despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously,
free from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists
succeeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted
at last in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. While this
advantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought
at too great a price and whether there would not have been a certain
profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the
mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater
care in structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter
veracity in the treatment of characters.

However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious
consideration, the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract
to itself more and more authors of rich natural endowment. In English
literature especially, prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe
and Swift, Richardson