It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand, are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the same process. But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the "Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself. This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But