Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later, we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods, the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said: that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely. CHAPTER III THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the "gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding (1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland, and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he