These are they who would make our proper subject begin with Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the right of entry to Defoe.

But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any one of them would almost suffice by itself.

In the first place the idea of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature.

In the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among those who believe in it, has yet dared to face.

You must carry your wall of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries.