do not appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot, such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is no character that I can see.  It is in fact only one of a vast multitude of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to, but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.

It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:  but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning of the second of these decades.  The history of the question of the relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the “Coverley Papers,” to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things.  It would probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the Spectator, during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation so much as hinted.  But when people began to consider literature and literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there is such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived.  It has become comparatively a commonplace:  and now the third stage—­that in which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious and try to turn it topsy-turvy—­has begun.

It is of course undeniable that the “Coverley Papers,” as they stand, are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the term.  There is no plot; some of what should be the most important characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them.  But these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally undeniable and much more important.  The first is that the papers could be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with only quantum suff. of addition and completion.  “The widow” is there in the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years.  The personages of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the same process.

But the second point is of greater importance still.  Not only could the “Coverley Papers,” be made into a novel without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.  This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of