of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or
at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were cramped
by his single theological purpose, and his unvaried allegoric or typical
form. Why Defoe did not discover the New World of Fiction, I at least
have never been able to put into any brief critical formula that
satisfies me, and I have never seen it put by any one else. He had not
only seen it afar off, he had made landings and descents on it; he had
carried off and exhibited in triumph natives such as Robinson Crusoe,
as Man Friday, as Moll Flanders, as William the Quaker; but he had
conquered, subdued, and settled no province therein. I like _Pamela_; I
like it better than some persons who admire Richardson on the whole more
than I do, seem to like it. But, as in all its author's work, the
handling seems to me academic--the working out on paper of an
ingeniously conceived problem rather than the observation or evolution
of actual or possible life. I should not greatly fear to push the
comparison even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe
limits. Let us be content with holding that in England at least, without
prejudice to anything further, Fielding was the first to display the
qualities of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer.

What are those qualities, as shown in _Joseph Andrews_? The faculty of
arranging a probable and interesting course of action is one, of course,
and Fielding showed it here. But I do not think that it is at any time
the greatest one; and nobody denies that he made great advances in this
direction later. The faculty of lively dialogue is another; and that he
has not often been refused; but much the same may be said of it. The
interspersing of appropriate description is another; but here also we
shall not find him exactly a paragon. It is in character--the chief
_differentia_ of the novel as distinguished not merely from its elder
sister the romance, and its cousin the drama, but still more from every