There is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation--for it can be styled nothing less--of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D'Urfé and La Calprenède, which English imitators and translators had been quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The _Francion_ of Sorel and the _Roman Bourgeois_ of Furetière--the latter, published in 1666, of especial interest to students of the English novel--had prepared the way for the exact opposite to the heroic romance; namely, the realistic story of every-day life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and Defoe--each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction. Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver's Travels_, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays of the beginning and the comedies of the close of the seventeenth century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than play-goers, and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse they came to expect bustle and pantomime rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels were awaited and received.