the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval
forefathers.

So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
ill to sort.

But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder
and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and