refinement and morality, has produced a large number of novelists, both
male and female, whose works are as immoral as those of Mrs. Behn,
without her excuse. Who, with all the advantages accruing from life
in a refined age, with every encouragement to pursue a better course,
have deliberately chosen to court an infamous notoriety by making vice
familiar and attractive. And this too, at a time when a general
confidence in the purity of contemporary literary works has practically
done away with parental censorship; when books of evil tendency are as
likely to fall into the hands of the young and susceptible as those of
elevating tendency--a circumstance which adds a new responsibility to
the duties of the conscientious writer.

[Footnote 87: Dunlop's "History of Fiction," chap. iv.]

[Footnote 88: "The Fair Hypocrite," "The Physician's Stratagem," "The
Wife's Resentment," "The Husband's Resentment," in two parts; "The
Happy Fugitive," "The Perjured Beauty."]

[Footnote 89: "History of Oroonoko," Mrs. Behn's "Collected plays and
novels."]

CHAPTER VI.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
I.--ENGLAND UNDER ANNE AND THE FIRST TWO GEORGES.
II.--SWIFT, ADDISON, DEFOE.
III.--RICHARDSON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT.

I.

The advance of a nation in numbers and civilization is accompanied by
so great a complexity of social conditions that in this volume it is
possible only to attempt to seize such salient characteristics of the
eighteenth century as may serve to throw light on the course of English
fiction. No age presents a more prosaic aspect. If we consider the
condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the
prevalence of abuses and corruption left by the ignorance or vice of
preceding years, and reflect at the same time upon the progressive
nature of the people, the practical habit of their minds, and the moral
earnestness which they never wholly lost, it is not surprising to find
that the century is one of reforms. Population and wealth had outgrown
the laws and customs which had hitherto served for their control, and
though in the earlier part of the period we find corruption in public
and private life, indifference in religion, inadequate provision for
the education of the young, gross abuses in jurisprudence, and
coarseness of action and taste throughout the social system, there is
also perceptible a solid foundation of good-sense and an earnest
desire for improvement, which gradually, as the centur