carried on by Addison and Steele some thirty years later.  The character of Sir Roger de Coverley is a real reflection of English country life in the eighteenth century; and with Steele’s domestic sketches in The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian (1709-1713), we definitely cross the border land that lies outside of romance, and enter the region of character study where the novel has its beginning.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MODERN NOVEL.  Notwithstanding this long history of fiction, to which we have called attention, it is safe to say that, until the publication of Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, no true novel had appeared in any literature.  By a true novel we mean simply a work of fiction which relates the story of a plain human life, under stress of emotion, which depends for its interest not on incident or adventure, but on its truth to nature.  A number of English novelists—­Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne—­all seem to have seized upon the idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have developed it simultaneously.  The result was an extraordinary awakening of interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly concerned with literature.  We are to remember that, in previous periods, the number of readers was comparatively small; and that, with the exception of a few writers like Langland and Bunyan, authors wrote largely for the upper classes.  In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a foremost place in English life and history.  These new readers and this new, powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper them.  They cared little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous Literary Club; and, so far as they read fiction at all, they apparently took little interest in the exaggerated romances, of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes.  Some new type of literature was demanded, this new type must express the new ideal of the eighteenth century, namely, the value and the importance of the individual life.  So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival.  To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,—­this was the purpose of our first novelists.  The eagerness with which their chapters were read in England, and the rapidity with which their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery appealed to readers everywhere.