banks, etc.”  “The Fair Jilt,” a Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love:  and so on.  Now these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern reader, were not matters of course then.  Afra very likely imitated; her works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field for much origin-hunting.  But whether she followed others or not, she led her own division.  All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience—­of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral—­that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not.  That conversation itself—­the subtlest instrument of all and the most effective for constructing character—­is so little developed, can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in which she herself was a copious practitioner.  But this mistake was not long to prevail:  and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language respecting her, and to whom we now come.

It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant him an outside position in relation to it.  Their exquisite reasons, so far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War are religious, and that they are allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying the double rule to verse we can exclude Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we shall be finely holden in understanding the same:  while it is by no means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must not cancel Don Quixote from the list of the world’s novels.  Even in prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation—­unless it comes from the foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry of the last generation or two—­comes from the almost equally foolish determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind.  Discarding prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing measure, even The Holy War is a novel, and that The Pilgrim’s Progress has every one of the four requisites—­plot, character, description, and dialogue—­while one of these requisites—­character with its accessory manners—­is further developed in the History of Mr. Badman after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division of