A novel may be defined as a fictitious story of modern life describing the management and mastery of the human passions, and especially the universal passion of love. Its power consists in the creation of ideal characters, which leave a real impress upon the reader's mind; it must be a prose _epic_ in that there is always a hero, or, at least, a heroine, generally both, and a _drama_ in its presentation of scenes and supplementary personages. Thackeray calls his _Vanity Fair_ a novel without a hero: it is impossible to conceive a novel without a heroine. There must also be a _dénouement_, or consummation; in short, it must have, in the words of Aristotle, a beginning, middle, and ending, in logical connection and consecutive interest. DANIEL DEFOE.--Before, however, proceeding to consider the modern novel, we must make mention of one author, distinctly of his own age as a political pamphleteer, but who, in his chief and inimitable work, stands alone, without antecedent or consequent. _Robinson Crusoe_ has had a host of imitators, but no rival. Daniel Foe, or, as he afterwards called himself, De Foe, was born in London, in the year 1661. He was the son of a butcher, but such was his early aptitude, for learning, that he was educated to become a dissenting minister. His own views, however, were different: he became instead a political author, and wrote with great force against the government of James II. and the Established Church, and in favor of the dissenters. When the Duke of Monmouth landed to make his fatal campaign, Defoe joined his standard; but does not seem to have suffered with the greater number of the duke's adherents. He was a warm supporter of William III.; and his famous poem, _The True-Born Englishman_, was written in answer to an attack upon the king and the Dutch, called _The Foreigners_. Of his own poem he says, in the preface, "When I see the town full of lampoons and invectives against the Dutch, only because they are foreigners, and the king reproached and insulted by insolent pedants and ballad-making poets for employing foreigners and being a foreigner himself, I confess myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby to let them see what a banter they put upon themselves, since--speaking of Englishmen _ab origine_--we are really all foreigners ourselves:" The Pict and painted Briton, treach'rous Scot, By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought; Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes, Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains; Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.