THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7] [7] A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or so of the nineteenth.

But the majority of the contents actually conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last chapter.
It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a time is at least as important as the major in determining general literary characteristics and tendencies.

Nor is this anywhere much more noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.
The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great: but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was too large and too various to be all mere imitation.

As a result, however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a very remarkable change.

Even before them the _nisus_ towards it, which has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.
Mrs.Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the form of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.
And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose fiction which was becoming endemic.