Certain other authors less distinguished than these, produced fiction of various kinds which also had some influence in the development, and further illustrate the tendency of the Novel to become a pliable medium for literary expression; a sort of net wherein divers fish might be caught.  Dr. Johnson, essayist, critic, coffee-house dictator, published the same year that Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” began to appear, his “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia”; a stately elegiac on the vanity of human pleasures, in which the Prince leaves his idyllic home and goes into the world to test its shams, only to return to his kingdom with the sad knowledge that it is the better part of wisdom in this vale of tears to prepare for heaven.  Of course this is fiction only in seeming and by courtesy, almost as far removed from the Novel as the same author’s mammoth dictionary or Lives of the Poets.  It has Richardson’s method of moralizing, while lacking that writer’s power of studying humanity in its social relations.  The sturdy genius of Dr. Johnson lay in quite other directions.

Richardson’s sentimentality, too, was carried on by MacKenzie in his “Man of Feeling” already mentioned as the favorite tear-begetter of its time, the novel which made the most prolonged attack upon the lachrymosal gland.  But it is only fair to this author to add that there was a welcome note of philanthropy in his story—­in spite of its mawkishness; his appeal for the under dog in great cities is a forecast of the humanitarianism to become rampant in later fiction.

Again, the seriousness which has always, in one guise or the other, underlain English fiction, soon crystalized in the contemporary eighteenth century novelists into an attempt to preach this or that by propaganda in story-form.  William Godwin, whose relations as father-in-law to Shelley gives him a not altogether agreeable place in our memory, was a leader in this tendency with several fictions, the best known and most readable being “Caleb Williams”:  radical ideas, social, political and religious, were mooted by half a dozen earnest-souled authors whose works are now regarded as links in the chain of development—­missing links for most readers of fiction, since their literary quality is small.  In later days, this kind of production was to be called purpose fiction and condemned or applauded according to individual taste and the esthetic and vital value of the book.  When the moralizing overpowered all else, we get a book like that friend of childhood, “Sanford and Merton,” which Thomas Day perpetrated in the year of grace 1783.  Few properly reared boys of a generation ago escaped this literary indiscretion:  its Sunday School solemnity, its distribution of life’s prizes according to the strictest moral tests, had a sort of bogey fascination; it was much in vogue long after Day’s time, indeed down to within our own memories.  Perhaps it is still read and relished in innocent corners of the earth..  In any case it is one of the outcomes of the movement just touched upon.