This clearly marks a distinction:  it gives a hint as to the departure made by Richardson in 1742, when he published “Pamela.”  It is not strictly the earliest discrimination between the Novel and the older romance; for the dramatist Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century shows his knowledge of the distinction.  And, indeed, there are hints of it in Elizabethan criticism of such early attempts as those of Lyly, Nast, Lodge and others.  Moreover, the student of criticism as it deals with the Novel must also expect to meet with a later confusion of nomenclature; the word being loosely applied to any type of prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale.  But here, at an early date, the severance is plainly indicated between the study of contemporary society and the elder romance of heroism, supernaturalism, and improbability.  It is a difference not so much of theme as of view-point, method and intention.

For underlying this attempt to come closer to humanity through the medium of a form of fiction, is to be detected an added interest in personality for its own sake.  During the eighteenth century, commonly described as the Teacup Times, an age of powder and patches, of etiquette, epigram and surface polish, there developed a keener sense of the value of the individual, of the sanctity of the ego, a faint prelude to the note that was to become so resonant in the nineteenth century, sounding through all the activities of man.  Various manifestations in the civilization of Queen Anne and the first Georges illustrate the new tendency.

One such is the coffee house, prototype of the bewildering club life of our own day.  The eighteenth century coffee house, where the men of fashion and affairs foregathered to exchange social news over their glasses, was an organization naturally fostering altruism; at least, it tended to cultivate a feeling for social relations.

Again, the birth of the newspaper with the Spectator Papers in the early years of the century, is another such sign of the times:  the newspaper being one of the great social bonds of humanity, for good or bad, linking man to man, race to race in the common, well-nigh instantaneous nexus of sympathy.  The influence of the press at the time of a San Francisco or Messina horror is apparent to all; but its effect in furnishing the psychology of a business panic is perhaps no less potent though not so obvious.  When Addison and Steele began their genial conversations thrice a week with their fellow citizens, they little dreamed of the power they set a-going in the world; for here was the genesis of modern journalism.  And whatever its abuses and degradations, the fourth estate is certainly one of the very few widely operative educational forces to-day, and has played an important part in spreading the idea of the brotherhood of man.