its portion.  Of the two great qualities of the novel—­Variety and Life—­it had never succeeded in attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of variety and no life at all.  There is hardly anything to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that fiction before the public.  How far there may be any real, though metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a question not to be discussed here.  But undoubtedly the fact of the contrast is a “document in the case,” and one of the most important in its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediaeval period in the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew.  The practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at.  But Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.

The two last discussed books, with Eromena and some others, are posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type.  The reign of Charles II., besides the “heroic” romances and Bunyan, and one most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in the history of the English Novel.  These are Richard Head and Afra Behn, otherwise “the divine Astraea.”  It is, however, something of an injustice to class them together:  for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it.  Of The English Rogue (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part, and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself.  It is quite openly a picaresque novel:  and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but from Sorel’s Francion, which had appeared in France some forty years before.  Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head’s we shall see how very far behind, even with forty years’ advantage in time, was the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the modern novel. Francion is not a work of genius:  and it does not pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure, unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together with little art in fable, and less in character.  But the author is to some extent “cumbered about