historical novel; still more for something else.  Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it.  Even here, he had had the “notion of the notion” supplied to him by Lyly in Euphues:  and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets.  But Jack Wilton the “traveller” is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus.  At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose “Cavalier” was not improbably suggested by him.  But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, which accompanies in the author of Moll Flanders a certain inability to make the most of it. The Unfortunate Traveller is a sort of compilation or congeries of current fabliaux, novelle, and facetiae, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction.  Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the Colloquies of Erasmus:  three centuries earlier than The Cloister and the Hearth, with much less genius than Charles Reade’s, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time.  But it gives us “disjectae membra novellae” rather than a novel itself:  and the oftener one reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet come.  The materials are there; the desire to utilise—­and even a faint vague idea of how to utilise—­them is there; but the art is almost completely absent.  Even regarded as an early attempt in the “picaresque” manner, it is abortive and only half organised.

The subject of the English “Heroic” Romance, in the wide sense, is one which has been very little dealt with.  Dunlop neglected it rather surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh’s chapter on the subject there was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere.  It must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some extent justified in their abstention.  The subject is a curious one:  and it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows at once how strong was the nisus towards prose fiction and how surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in kind.  For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt—­we cannot call it a century of invention—­from Ford to Congreve, does not add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English books.  As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous.  And yet the attempts are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the historical student of literature.  One or two of them have a sort of shadowy name and place in literary history already.