serving.”  He names his characters, tries to give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but occasionally something distantly resembling conversation.  Head takes no trouble of this kind:  and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such thing is required of him.  Very few of the characters of The English Rogue have so much as a name to their backs:  they are “a prentice,” “a master,” “a mistress,” “a servant,” “a daughter,” “a tapster,” etc.  They are invested with hardly the slightest individuality:  the very hero is a scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion.  These beads themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of “coney-catching,” over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand fabliaux, novelle, “jests,” and so forth:  and which are now flung together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their own experience.  When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of foreign countries, taken from “voyage-and-travel” books; of the tricks of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything and everything that the writer’s dull fancy can think of, are foisted in.  The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended as a close:  but there is no particular reason why it should not have extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred.  It could have had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.

    [4] He has a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
    never used in the actual story.

One other point deserves notice.  The tone of the Spanish and French picaresque novel had never been high:  but it is curiously degraded in this English example.  Furetiere honestly called his book Roman Bourgeois.  Head might have called his, if he had written in French, Roman Canaille.  Not merely the sentiments but the very outward trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book.  Yet we do not get any real reality in compensation.  Head is no Defoe:  he can give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll Flanders in her middle age:  but he makes not the slightest attempt to give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll’s or Jack’s habit, environment, novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever.  The receipt to make The English Rogue is simply this:  “Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the ‘coney-catching’ variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them.”  Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this muck-heap—­which the present writer, having had to read it a second time for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.