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.  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.