Fuller as an historian had it; John Bunyan as an ethical writer had
it. Each one was possessed of the short-story faculty, but only
manifested it, as it were, by accident. Not until Daniel Defoe and the
rise of the newspaper do we note any advance in technique. Defoe's
main contribution was the _short-story essay_, which stands midway
between the anecdote, or germ-plot, buried in a mass of extraneous
material, and the short-story proper. The growth of this form, as
developed by Swift, Steel, Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb, has been
traced and criticised elsewhere.[14] It had this one great advantage
that, whatever its departures from the strict technique of the modern
short-story, it was capable of being read at one sitting, stood by
itself, and gained "the immense force derivable from _totality_."

[Footnote 14: In the third chapter of _The Great English Essayists_,
vol. iii of _The Reader's Library_, published by Messrs. Harper &
Brothers, 1909.]

In the _True Revelation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal_, Defoe
is again strangely in advance of his time, as he is in so many other
ways. Here is an almost perfect example of the most modern method of
handling a ghost-tale. Surely, in whatever department of literature
we seek, we shall find nothing to surpass it in the quality of
_verisimilitude_. The way in which Drelincourt's _Book on Death_ is
introduced and subsequently twice referred to is a master-stroke of
genius. In days gone by, before they were parted, we are told, Mrs.
Veal and Mrs. Bargrave "would often console each other's adverse
fortunes, and read together Drelincourt _On Death_ and other good
books." At the time when the story opens Mrs. Bargrave has gone to
live in Canterbury, and Mrs. Veal is in Dover. To Mrs. Bargrave in
Canterbury the apparition appears, though she does not know that it is