We have seen, then, that the prose novel—­a late growth both in ancient and in modern times in all countries—­was a specially late and slow-yielding one in English.  Although Thoms’s Early English Prose Romances is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in verse.  Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably from its uncomfortably meteoric position, and some other things help:  but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no possible sleight of weighing.  Still, as we have seen, this did not matter very much:  for the verse got “transprosed” sooner or later, and the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted ad eundem in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.

Yet the novel proper lingered:  and, except in the single and eccentric masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.  Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more still eccentric masterpiece of Gulliver, before the novel-period really opened.  It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago—­it is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons born when others were still living who drew their first breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world.  How soon it grew to a popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.  Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out of, or read them in, public libraries.  I do not know whether there exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I dare say it does.  I should not at all wonder if this total ran into scores of thousands:  if you were to bring in short stories it would certainly do so.  People have almost left off shaking their heads over the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public libraries themselves:  in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make out that it is decreasing.  It may be so; or it may not.  But what remains certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom “reading” simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very meaning of the word “literature.”  We know that the romance was originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in “Romance” language.  We are less unsophisticated now:  but there are certainly large numbers of His Majesty’s subjects by whom a novel on this principle ought to be called “an english” though it might have to share that appellation with the newspaper.