Invocations are out of fashion, yet I wanted to make this small one, for two reasons. Firstly, may a little of Clark's integrity be with us through this course; and secondly, may he accord us a little inattention! For I am not keeping quite strictly to the terms laid down--"Period or periods of English Literature." This condition, though it sounds liberal and is liberal enough in spirit, happens verbally not quite to suit our subject, and I shall occupy the introductory lecture in explaining why this is. The points raised may seem trivial. But they will lead us to a convenient vantage post from which we can begin our main attack next week. We need a vantage post, for the novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous--no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature--irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them. Perhaps we ought to define what a novel is before starting. This will not take a second. M. Abel Chevalley has, in his brilliant little manual,[1] provided a definition, and if a French critic cannot define the English novel, who can? It is, he says, "a fiction in prose of a certain extent" (une fiction en prose d'une certaine étendue). That is quite good enough for us, and we may perhaps go so far as to add that the extent should not be less than 50,000 words. Any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words will be a novel for the purposes of these lectures, and if this seems to you unphilosophic will you think of an alternative definition, which will include _The Pilgrim's Progress_, _Marius the Epicurean_, _The Adventures of a Younger Son_, _The Magic Flute_, _The Journal of the Plague_, _Zuleika Dobson_, _Rasselas_, _Ulysses_, and _Green Mansions_, or else will give reasons for their exclusion? Parts of our spongy tract seem more fictitious than other parts, it is true: near the middle, on a tump of grass, stand Miss Austen with the figure of Emma by her side, and Thackeray holding up Esmond. But no intelligent remark known to me will define the tract as a whole. All we can say of it is that it is bounded by two chains of mountains neither of which rises very abruptly--the opposing ranges of Poetry and of History--and bounded on the third side by a sea--a sea that we shall encounter when we come to _Moby Dick_.