Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank fairy tale demanding a certain licence of nature to make possible its supernatural events. Like the _Romance of the Rose_, unlike the _Faërie Queene_, it takes its licence in its first sentence--'As I slept, I dreamed'--and is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases without much loss of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and continuity, is of the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality that made Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no longer be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And Defoe, writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality very much more conscientiously developed. [Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE] With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe, if he had described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it as short-winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with verisimilitude, and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read Defoe,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of Justice.' No compliment could have pleased him better. [Lamb and Defoe.] The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the East India House, immediately after the labour of entering the accounts of a tea sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of Defoe's books that goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The author,' writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the _narrator_ chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting to notice that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of Flaubert's maxim, that a writer should be everywhere invisible in his work, and that his books should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully impressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phases, till you cannot choose but believe them.' Then follows the sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers.' [The new world of matter-of-fact.]