and made them so by the assumption. * * * * * [Epilogue.] No: Cervantes is too simple a man to do anything but suffer in discussion. There are men whom you know well, who seem to elude you like the final mystery of metaphysics when you try to talk about them. My history and not Cervantes is the clearer for the rags and tatters of observation I have picked off him one by one. I had put them there myself. It was necessary, for the purposes of my book, to notice the Eastern character of his story-telling and his position between rogue novel and romance, but, now that it is done, I am glad to go back to him without pre-occupations. There is yet hot water in the kettle, and tea in the pot, and four hours to spend with _Don Quixote_ before I go to bed. Cervantes, at least, will bear me no malice, but tell me his story as simply as before I had tried to bring it into argument. THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING [The Character.] THE detailed, silver-point portrait studies of Fanny Burney, the miniatures of Jane Austen, and the stronger etchings of Fielding and Smollett, owed their existence to something outside the art of story-telling, something other than the grave, humorous pictures of Chaucer, or the hiding of real people under the homespun of lovesick shepherds, or the gay autobiographies of swindling rogues. They owed it to an art which in its beginnings seemed far enough away from any sort of narrative. In those happy, thievish times when plagiary was a virtue to be cried upon the housetops, this art, or rather this artistic form, had been, like much else, stolen from antiquity.