1796. In point of style both Mitford and Roscoe are far in advance of several of the writers we have been considering. To compilers such as 'honest Cawmell,' whose books 'no man can number,' and Henry, a still further descent is necessary, though they are but types of the pedantic hacks who began to abound as the demand for large works of reference came into being. During the eighteenth century, at least, all this journeyman work of literature was done vastly better in France.

John Campbell (1708-1775), who compiled untold volumes of quasi-erudite character at the rate of two guineas a sheet, is chiefly associated with the ancient and modern Universal Histories which appeared at intervals between 1750 and 1765. Campbell was one of the directors of the staff of unmitigated pedants who conducted this voluminous work-for many years the laughing-stock of European scholars. A collateral compiler, Robert Henry (17181790), in his once well-known History of England (1771-85) in six volumes, was one of the first to classify his work under such headings as Learning, Arts, Manners, Religion, and so on, in preference to the continuous chronological arrangement.

Of much more genuine interest to the scholar than any of these perfunctory compilations are the antiquarian labours of historical students, who based annals upon a study of original documents, or digested original materials, and manipulated them in such a manner as to render new facts and results readily available to the historian proper. Such labours are only indirectly, perhaps, of literary importance. But it was only upon such a substructure that the Gothic or Romantic revival (and the renewed interest in and the fairer appreciation of the Middle Ages, which supplies one of its chief stimuli) could possibly be reared. Among such works observe the Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth (1751) of Thomas Birch; the Memorials and Letters (of James I. and Charles I. in 1762 and 1766) and the Annals of Scotland (1776) of Sir David Dalrymple (1726-1792), known on the Scottish bench as Lord Hailes; the curious anti-Whig Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (168094), published in three volumes in 1771 by Sir John Dalrymple (1726-1810); the Original Papers, containing the Secret History of Great Britain (1666-1714), brought out by James Macpherson, of Ossian fame, in 1775; the Biographical History of England (1769) of James Granger (1723-1776), the famous print-collector and book despoiler; the Illustrations of British History (1791) of Edmund Lodge; the Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of

England (1773) of Joseph Strutt; the Ecclesiastical History of England (1757) of Ferdinand Warner (1703-1767); the Historical and Critical Enquiry (1759) of William Tytler (1711-1792), and the Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated (1788) of John Whittaker (1735-1808), the last two works having both been provoked by the treatment accorded to Mary by Robertson in his History of Scotland, a book of great impartiality, which was also attacked as being much too favourable to the unfortunate queen. The Scottish group would hardly be complete without mention of John Pinkerton (1758-1826), a collector of Scots songs, an early authority on medals, and author of A History of Scotland under the Stuarts down to 1542; this was published in 1797, in which year Pinkerton also issued his Iconographia Scotica. A brief reference is also due to Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), the distinguished classical antiquary, a friend of Madame D'Arblay, and one of the first collectors of Caxtons, who wrote on Troy and was the author of learned but much criticised Observations and Enquiries Relating to Ancient History (1767).

Two more notable books of a semi-historical character come into our period, though scarcely within our province. The Constitution of England (in French 1771, in English 1775), by John Louis de Lolme (1740-1807), and the compendious Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9), by Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), a typical lawyer, Englishman, and Conservative.

CHAPTER VII.

THE GREAT NOVELISTS.

THE literary chronologer generally associates the year 1740 (in round figures) with his concise summary of the Origin of the Novel. But novels are probably at least as old as Greek vases. The ancients had their Milesian Tales and their later fictions, after the pattern of The Golden Ass. The medievals had their Acta Sanctorum and their tales of Italian gallantry, not to speak of the rich oriental fiction to which the Crusades had supplied a key. One of Caxton's earliest ventures in England was his edition of the Morte d'Arthur; and from 1485 onwards prose fictions of varying patterns had always floated upon the wayward stream of popularity. The circulation of these fictions must have been very large-no disproportionate' tyranny,' such as the novel of to-day exercises, but still very large. They were, however, often circulated in an ephemeral form; neither antiquity nor the sixteenth century were prepared to regard novels as a dignified branch of literature, and the town populations, who were the great readers, would not give much for a novel, while they could see a play for a penny, and buy it in print for fivepence or sixpence. The habitation of the novel had hitherto been in the camp or the boudoir, the attic or the kitchen; it was the distinctive achievement of the eighteenth century to earn for it a recognized and permanent position in the library.

Many forms of prose fiction had secured their passing vogue in Britain since the days of Caxton and the Arthurian prose romance: such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic, the new centos of tales of chivalry like The Seven Champions of Christendom, the Utopian or political or philosophical romances (like Harington's Oceana or Bishop Godwin's Man in the Moone).

Hard upon these came the grotesque and facetious stories retailed from the Spanish or the French in dwarf volumes or chap-books, the terribly prolix romance of modernized classic heroism, like the Grand Cyrus of 1635 (interesting enough, perhaps, in its day, when you knew that Cyrus was the Grand Condé), and then an allegory of far other design-the unique romance of Bunyan. With the Restoration came in the novel of French and Italian gallantry, of which Aphra Behn supplies us with examples. Finally, with the advent of the Brunswicks, we are confronted with the development of the Utopian or philosophical romance, by means of the wonderful application of imaginary travel to purposes of satire by Swift, and with the no less notable transformation of the contemned picaresque novel of the rusty little duodecimos into the minutely prosaic chronicle-novel of Daniel Defoe.

Tabooed though it was by the serious, the picaresque romance (so called from the fact that the picaro or scamp is always the main character of the narrative) enjoyed a popularity, from the close of the sixteenth century, which destroyed the novelettes and the euphuistic tales, and seriously menaced the long-winded ideal romances. The great original of this class of literature was the Lazarillo de Tormes of Hurtado de Mendoza, published in 1553. Imitations abounded, the most notable being Aleman's Life of Guzman de Alfarache (1599) and Quevedo's more humorous Life of Paul the Sharper. In France, Charles

Sorel essayed a work of the same genre in his Histoire Comique de Francion of 1622;' Nash had attempted an imitation as early as 1594; even in Germany the influence of the picaro was felt, as is witnessed by Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus of 1668. Most of the imitations, however, were sad failures, and England, at least, was better content with versions from the original Spanish. The fiction that was current in England during the seventeenth century was thus almost wholly imported, and seems to have lost none of its popularity by that fact.

The Age of Johnson changed all this. The old romance had long been moribund, and the contemporaries of Addison and of Jeremy Collier felt that the picaro was unfit to mix with polite society. Then came Daniel Defoe, who, by means of Robinson Crusoe, threw a crowning splendour over the novel of a past age. His other novels, blending the memoir and the Bow Street chronicle with the rambling story of intrigue which formed the staple of English importation from abroad, show that he is to be considered on the whole rather as a fulfiller of old tradition than a creator of new, though his masterpiece certainly served as a bridge between the old realism and the new. Of course, it had hosts of imitators and two score, at least, of 'Robinsonaden' appeared during the first half of the eighteenth century. Shortly before this same half-century closed, there began in England a stirring development, due to the energies of a most remarkable group of writers, all of whom come into our period. The tide of importation ebbed and ebbed until, in 1755, we find Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of novels. from her daughter in England. This was prophetic of the great export trade that England was to have in the redin1 See Le Breton, Le Roman au XVIIme Siècle.

2

2 See Chapter VIII.