A couple of examples of this may be treated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of the first class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a fashion to which there are few exact parallels.
A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as literature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_ by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world was to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--at once.

It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary romantic type.

But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand Pophar" in the centre of Africa.

This country is civilised, but not yet Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the exercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so much satiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at least supposed to be both civilised and Christian.

It is a "respectable" book both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save historically.
[8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.
The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing.