The writer’s cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly:  but finishes off with some subsequent and quite verisimilar experiences of the Dutch ship.  The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England, though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly.  But it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages, and was apparently taken as a genuine account.

Neville’s art is in fact not inconsiderable.  Earlier voyages and travels of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details:  and the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington tradition.  But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually been lacking before:  and though some of his details are pretty “free” it is by no means only through such things that these qualities are secured.  To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all.  In fact, though Neville was a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in any way his object here.  Whatever that object may have been, he has certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.  Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands—­accidentally this time almost without doubt—­at the opposite pole from the talk-deluged romances of the Scudery type.  Whether Defoe actually knew it or not matters exceedingly little:  that something of his method, and in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here before him, seems quite indisputable.  Perhaps not the least piquant thing to do with The Isle of Pines is to contrast it with Oceana.  Of course the contrast is unfair:  nearly all contrasts are.  But there is actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of the two friends:  and their complete difference in every other respect makes this more curiously apparent.  And another odd thing is that Neville—­“Rota"-republican as he was—­should have adopted patriarchal (one can hardly say legitimate) government here.

Congreve’s Incognita (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra’s tales than to that of the heroic romances.  It is a short story of seventy-five small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type.  The friends Aurelian and Hippolito take each other’s names for certain purposes, and their beloveds, “Incognita,” Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed accordingly:  while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other stock ingredients of the kind are freely used.  Most writers have either said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree.  Being Congreve’s it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they