_Oroonoko_ marks a distinct advance in English fiction. Nearly all novels before this had consisted of a series of stories held together by a loosely formed plot running through a number of volumes, sometimes only five, but occasionally, as in _The Grand Cyrus_, filling ten quartos. Their form was such that like the _Thousand and One Nights_ they could be continued indefinitely. Most of these novels belonged either to the pastoral romance or the historical allegory. In the former the ladies and gentlemen who in a desultory sort of way carried on the plot were disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses and lived in idyllic state in Arcadia. In the latter they masqueraded under the names of kings and queens of antiquity and entered with the flourish of trumpets and the sound of drums. _Oroonoko_ was the first English novel with a well developed plot. It moves along rapidly, without digression, to its tragic conclusion. Not until Fielding wrote _Joseph Andrews_ was the plot of any English novel so definitely wrought. The lesser writer had a slight advantage over the greater. Mrs. Behn's novel is constructed upon dramatic lines, so that it holds the interest more closely to the main characters, and the end is awaited with intense expectation; while Fielding chose the epic form, which is more discursive, and _Joseph Andrews_ like all his novels is excessively tame, almost hackneyed in its conclusion. Mrs. Behn's black hero is the first distinctly drawn character in English fiction, the first one that has any marked personality. Sometimes the enthusiasm with which he is described brings a smile to the lips of the modern reader and reminds one of the heroic savages of James Fenimore Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson. She writes of him: "He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be Fancy'd: The most famous Statuary could not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turned from Head to Foot.... There was no one Grace wanting, that bears the Standard of true Beauty." And thus she continues the description in the superlative degree. But the story is for the most part realistic. Although the scenes in Africa show the influence of the French heroic novels, as if the author were afraid to leave her story in its simple truth but must adorn it with purple and ermine, as soon as it is transferred to Surinam, where Mrs. Behn had lived, it becomes real. It has local colouring, at that time an almost unknown attribute. It has the atmosphere of the tropics. The descriptions are vivid, and often photographic. Occasionally they are exaggerated, but few travellers to a region of which their hearers know nothing have been able to resist the temptation to deviate from the exact truth. But the whole novel, even at this late day, leaves one with the impression that it is a true biography.