It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its longer examples—­for the smaller novelle could amuse in their own way sometimes, though they could hardly absorb.  It is equally impossible to imagine any one being “enthralled” by Euphues.  Admiration, of a kind, must have been the only passion excited by it.  In the Arcadia there is a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse—­to the almost Spenserian visionariness of parts—­to the gracious lulling atmosphere of the whole.  If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or volume three.  I have said that I can read Parismus for pastime:  but the pastime that it provides is certainly not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and unlemoned barley-water in books of the Parthenissa class.  If with them conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the kind go-between Sleep.  We know, of course, that their contemporaries did not go to sleep over them:  but it was because they felt that they were being done good to—­that they were in the height of polite society—­that their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross.  The time, in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress on one side and “a friend and a bottle” on the other.  That a novel could enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it did enter.

Addison and Steele in the “Coverley Papers” had shown the way to construct this new spell:  Defoe actually constructed it.  It may be that some may question whether the word “exciting” applies exactly to his stories.  But this is logomachy:  and in fact a well-willing reader can get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of ill on the part of the getter.  At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.

In presence of this superior—­this emphatically and doubly “novel”—­interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.  The relations of Robinson Crusoe to Selkirk’s experiences and to one or two other books (especially the already mentioned Isle of Pines) may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy himself with them.  The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which some biographers have