IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION

INDEX




THE ENGLISH NOVEL




CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE


One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to