'This class of literature,' says Mr. Gosse, 'was treated with marked disdain, and having been read to pieces by the women, was thrown into the fire.' One specimen, _Incognita_, deserves a word of mention as the first work of the youthful Congreve. Some variety was introduced into pure fiction by the importation from France by Mrs. Manley, already mentioned as a dramatist, of the political novel, in which the actions of living monarchs and statesmen were represented under transparent disguises. The presses of Amsterdam and Cologne had long teemed with such productions, and Mrs. Manley's _Atalanta_ and _Zarah_ are conspicuous English examples. Another romance, _A New and further Discovery of the Isle of Pines_, in a letter professing to emanate from Cornelius van Sloetton, a Dutchman (1668), deserves some attention from its possible influence on Defoe. It has been represented to be connected with Australian discovery, with which it has in fact nothing to do, the imaginary island being placed in the very centre of the Indian Ocean. It afforded the theme for Voltaire's joke about the Englishman _qui travaillait si bien_ that the island on which he was wrecked was shortly afterwards found to be peopled by twelve thousand English Protestants. CHAPTER XIV. ESSAYISTS AND LETTER WRITERS, LITERARY HISTORIANS. The most important part of the posthumous papers of Samuel Butler, the discovery of which in the eighteenth century has been mentioned, was his _Characters_, composed upon the model of Theophrastus, and fairly entitling him to the appellation of the English Theophrastus, which is not the highest encomium imaginable. As the only work of the kind which has come down to us from antiquity, the _Characters_ of Theophrastus, which are in reality much later than the time of that successor of Aristotle, have passed as models, a reputation in excess of their desert. They offer an acute and entertaining enumeration of various peculiarities of character, but do not succeed in presenting the personage as a whole, and have much the air of being compiled from traits delineated with a real truth of representation by the comic poets. Butler's _Characters_ are of just the same kind, and his work is rather a museum of particulars than a gallery of portraits. The age of Charles II. by no means lives in him as the age of Anne lives in Addison. La Bruyère, Butler's more celebrated French successor, who certainly never read and probably never heard of him, fell into precisely the same error from too timid an adherence to Theophrastus; and the improvement upon him effected by Addison may be compared to the service rendered to sculpture by Dædalus, the first, it is said, to show the human form in motion. Isolated remarks in Butler's essays are frequently very shrewd and pregnant; as when he says of the newsmonger, 'He would willingly bear his share in any public calamity to have the pleasure of hearing and telling it;' or of the hunter, 'Let the hare