were spun as ships heaved over the seas, and sagas spoken beside hearth fires far in the frozen north.  Prose narratives, epic in theme or of more local import, were handed down from father to son, transmitted from family to family, through the exercise of a faculty of memory that now, in a day when labor-saving devices have almost atrophied its use, seems well nigh miraculous.  Prose story-telling, which allows of ample description, elbow room for digression, indefinite extension and variation from the original kernel of plot, lends itself admirably to the imaginative needs of humanity early or late.

With the English race, fiction began to take con-structural shape and definiteness of purpose in Elizabethan days.  Up to the sixteenth century the tales were either told in verse, in the epic form of Beowulf or in the shrunken epic of a thirteenth century ballad like “King Horn”; in the verse narratives of Chaucer or the poetic musings of Spenser.  Or else they were a portion of that prose romance of chivalry which was vastly cultivated in the middle ages, especially in France and Spain, and of which we have a doughty exemplar in the Morte D’Arthur, which dates nearly a century before Shakspere’s day.  Loose construction and no attempt to deal with the close eye of observation, characterize these earlier romances, which were in the main conglomerates of story using the double appeal of love and war.

But at a time when the drama was paramount in popularity, when the young Shakspere was writing his early comedies, fiction, which was in the fulness of time to conquer the play form as a popular vehicle of story-telling, began to rear its head.  The loosely constructed, rambling prose romances of Lyly of euphuistic fame, the prose pastorals of Lodge from which model Shakspere made his forest drama, “As You Like It,” the picaresque, harum-scarum story of adventure, “Jack Wilton,” the prototype of later books like “Gil Blas” and “Robinson Crusoe,”—­these were the early attempts to give prose narration a closer knitting, a more organic form.

But all such tentative striving was only preparation; fiction in the sense of more or less formless prose narration, was written for about two centuries without the production of what may be called the

Novel in the modern meaning of the word.  The broader name fiction may properly be applied, since, as we shall see, all novels are fiction, but all fiction is by no means Novels.  The whole development of the Novel, indeed, is embraced within little more than a century and a half; from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present time.  The term Novel is more definite, more specific than the fiction out of which it evolved; therefore, we must ask ourselves wherein lies the essential difference.  Light is thrown by the early use of the word in critical reference in English.  In reading the following from Steele’s “Tender Husband,” we are made to realize that the stark meaning of the term implies something new:  social interest, a sense of social solidarity:  “Our amours can’t furnish out a Romance; they’ll make a very pretty Novel.”