I have adumbrated somewhere--in some previous pessimism!--the perturbation that must beset any Anglo-Saxon who desired to point out to almost any grown-up foreigner of average intelligence the glories of the English novel before, say, the day of the _Yellow Book_. Let us then examine with a little more attention the chief lights of that Institution between, say, 1745, the year of the death of Swift, and, say, 1890, when the _Yellow Book_ was well on the way. Swift himself is obviously one of those solitary figures like, in their different ways, Shakespeare or Smollett or the author of _The Way of All Flesh_. In a sense he resembles Bunyan, that is to say he wrote allegories which, as a literary _genre_, are usually tiresome and unconvincing; but in his case, as in that of Bunyan, his fierce powers of observation and rendering carry him, as it were, in spite of himself, into the realms of realism. It is to be doubted if Swift ever aimed--as did, say, Mr. H. G. Wells in, say, _The First Men in the Moon_,--at giving the reader the sense of vicarious experience. Nevertheless he got there all the same and the corrosive nature of his misanthropy almost aids the sense of reality with which he overwhelms us. The “purpose” of _Gulliver’s Travels_ was no doubt philosophic, as the purpose of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was moral; but Lilliput is as real to us as the Slough of Despond and the Yahoos are the figures of the most horrible experience of every man who has come across them. So that if to your intelligent--and of course slightly cynical--foreigner you presented _Gulliver_ and left it at that he might remain edified or horror-struck according as his individual frame of mind were pessimist of the other thing. But supposing you were to present him with the Steele-cum-Addison collaboration of the _Tatler_ or the _Spectator_ or with _Tom Jones_ itself, which was written about a quarter of a century later than _Gulliver_ and thirty years or so after the last number of the _Spectator_ appeared in 1714: and supposing you added--yes, certainly, suppose you add _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_, the first appearing or being written between 1760 and 1767 and the second being published in 1768! Keep up your sleeve Tobias Smollett whose _Humphry Clinker_ was published three years after the _Sentimental Journey_ and in the year of Smollett’s death at the age of fifty. And let us conclude this immediate inquiry of ours as ending with the awful name of the Wizard of the North who was born in the year of Smollett’s death and lived to be sixty.