the description even more:  but it is truest of all of the characters.  Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here there was “no allaying Thames” in the shape of allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners.  It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter.  His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art.  But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist’s art that Defoe has not.  The smaller tales in the Tatler and its followers undoubtedly did something to remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite for it.  But they were nothing new:  the short tale being of unknown antiquity.  The “Coverley Papers” were new and did much more.  This new kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners—­the play lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form.  But the process was there; the instances of it were highly reputed and widely known.  It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further step still would be taken.  It was actually taken by the person who had suggested the periodical essay itself.

Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him that is read—­his novels.  Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:  indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out.  Yet further, the most adequate and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest—­the special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the delight, of his readers.  We shall have to deal with this too.  But the point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different, and we may reach it best by the ordinary “statement of case.”

Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English literature, was a new departure by almost an old man.  He was all but, if not quite, sixty when Robinson Crusoe appeared:  and a very few following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous “minor” novels.  The subject of the first every one knows