Violent indeed is the transition from John Bunyan to Aphra Behn, but in fact the living fiction of the age is almost summed up in these two names. But for the demonstration of the contrary afforded by the state of French literature since 1830, one would almost have been inclined to formulate it as a maxim that the drama and the novel cannot flourish together. The almost utter barrenness of the Restoration age in the latter class of literature is certainly very remarkable. All needful conditions seemed present in a teeming national life, clever writers, and a public that craved to be amused. It seems difficult to offer any explanation except that it had as yet occurred to none to depart from French models, and that the French exemplars of the day, like Samuel Weller, disdained all under the degree of 'a female markis.' Hence the healthy realism without which the English novel cannot prosper was impossible, and it was left to the Fieldings and Smolletts of the next age to effect a momentous revolution in art by the simple discovery that for the novelist's purpose, 'Jack was as good as his master.' One variety of fiction, apparently still popular at the Restoration, gradually died out--the interminable romance of the Clelia class, by which French polite society under Louis XIII. had replaced the exploded romance of chivalry. Of the few examples of this which English literature still produced, it will suffice to name Lord Orrery's _Parthenissa_, whose heroine, as an example of chastity, lived long enough to be dethroned by Pamela. Mrs. Behn's tales, it need not be said, are constructed upon principles in every respect antipodal to _Parthenissa_; they are, however, much less objectionable than her comedies. They are on the French pattern, brief and bright, but inevitably conventional. At the present day, however, when the disuse of an equally conventional fashion is restoring action to the rank from which it had been almost displaced by dialogue, Mrs. Behn's tales might be not unprofitably read as examples of movement and condensation; and occasionally of strong situation, of which she rarely makes the most. The most celebrated is _Oroonoko_, the groundwork of Southern's play, and itself founded on facts within the authoress's knowledge. Among other remarkable passages is one descriptive of the effects of the electric eel. Mrs. Behn's stories are types of a large number of miniature romances, apparently little noticed in their own day, and utterly unknown in ours, which they have not always reached in other fashion than Protus's 'Little tract on worming dogs, Whereof the name, in sundry catalogues, Is extant yet.'