he mourned, while in prison, his long separation from his wife and children, show the natural tenderness of his disposition, as well as the greatness of the sacrifice which he was making for his religion:—­“The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I often brought to mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with; especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all I had beside.”

With the allegories of Bunyan, we leave ideality behind us as a characteristic feature of English fiction.  The knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood and his merry men, the princes and princesses of the “Arcadia,” the pilgrim Christian, were the ideal heroes of the particular periods to which they belong.  They were placed amid the scenes which seemed most attractive, and were endowed with the qualities which seemed most admirable to the men whose imaginations created them.  But, with the exception perhaps of Robin Hood, they were purely ideal, without prototypes in nature.  The writer of fiction had not yet turned his attention to the delineation of character, to the study of complex social questions, to the portrayal of actual life.  With the fall of Puritan power, begins a great intellectual change.  History shows, since the Restoration, a tendency which has continuously grown stronger and wider, to subordinate the imagination to the reason of man, to withdraw political and social questions from the influence of mere tradition, to subject them instead, to the test of practical experience, and to encourage the patient physical investigations which have resulted in the triumphs of modern science.  This tendency has pervaded all the channels of human industry.  Its effect upon works of fiction has been to introduce into that department of literature, a spirit of realism, and a love of investigating the problems of life and character, which have resulted in the modern novel.  Henceforth we shall meet no more ideal beings, but men or women, more or less true to nature.  In the fiction of the Restoration are first observable the new tendencies, which, although but slightly marked at first, have finally given to the English novel its present importance.  An attempt to trace the gradual perfection of this form of literature, its development into a work of art, into a natural history of men, into a truthful reflection of very varied social conditions, will occupy the remainder of this volume.

CHAPTER V.

THE RESTORATION.  ROGER BOYLE.  MRS. MANLEY.  MRS. BEHN.

I.