As we have seen, Defoe in his _Advice from the Scandalous Club_, that was a “feature” of his periodical _Review of the Affairs of France_, very little anticipated--but by five years, indeed--what may be regarded as the fiction of the Addison-Steele collaboration. One is so apt to regard Defoe as of the seventeenth and Addison as of the eighteenth centuries that this appears rather astonishing, but actually the _Review_ ran from 1704 to 1713 and the _Tatler_ plus _Spectator_ from 1709 to 1714. Defoe’s publication was so essentially commercial and the other two so essentially social that the matter is rather one of chronology than comparison. The fact that the novel had not yet begun as a commercial “proposition” to come into its own reduced Addison and Steele no doubt from the rank of novelists to those of draftsmen of “characters.” The novels of Defoe were “faked” memoirs and the other fiction of the period mostly consisted of equally “faked” memoirs of persons of quality, court-mistresses, and the like. And the “characters” and sham correspondence about social questions of the day that characterized the _Spectator_ may well be considered as developments of those popular, fictitious productions. Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest are as it were the characters of a novel, standing about and waiting for employment as the leaden soldiers of a child await their owner’s orders to fall in. The idea of sustained fiction might indeed, if you liked and if you analysed the matter very closely, be said not by any means yet to have reached the public consciousness, and though for us _Clarissa_ may seem to be the first of novels, its peculiar form--of correspondence--may well, in the public mind of its day, have given it the aspect of the last of the spurious memoirs. And, considering the nature of the future influence of Richardson over the French realists from Diderot to Flaubert, it may be more accurate to regard that aspect as the truer one. For, in effect, the French realist movement from Diderot’s _Le Neveu de Rameau_ to _Le Rouge et le Noir_ and again to _Madame Bovary_ may in the last event be regarded as much more a movement for the production of fictitious memoirs than the narration of sustained tales, the difference between Richardson, Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad or Turgenev being simply one of form. Richardson, that is to say, tried to assure you that Clarissa was a real person by the mechanical device of publishing her letters, whilst Flaubert and his school try to hypnotize you into believing in their characters by methods of projection rather than of narration.