But there can be no doubt of the English character of the text both in general and in detail.  It is redolent of English middle-class life as it was in the days before our grandfathers decided that the human body was an obscene thing and its functions deplorable.  It has the middle-class love of good food—­Colchester oysters (famous then as now), asparagus, peaches, apricots, candied ginger, China oranges, comfits, pancakes—­enough to make the mouth water.  It has the solid English furniture, with all its ritual of solemnity; “vallians” (valences), “daslles” (tassels), big bedsteads, Chiny-ware, plush chairs, linen cupboards.  It has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth—­the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—­why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street, High Holborn.

It has likewise many touches which show knowledge of the average fairly prosperous English life—­the merchant’s, the shopkeeper’s, the sea-captain’s.  The author clearly knew the routine of trade.  He knew that at New Year’s Day the “day-book” had to be fully written up for scrutiny and stock-taking and sending out of accounts. (But the pleasures or torments of love are such that “the squire is so full of business that he can’t spare half-an-hour to write it out.”  The brief description of his feelings which follows, conventional, perhaps, to some extent, has a certain life in it, as if the writer, embittered, was recalling his own youthful experience.) He knew, too, what to-day we only know in the mass through the newspapers, that a merchant’s business depends not only upon watching the markets, but upon the actual supply of material—­“what commodities are arrived or expected,” and whether tea is up 1/2d. or tin 3/4d. down, or if hogs closed firm.  The commercial world changes only its methods of communication and expression.

The first chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary interest.  From the literary point of view, it is a near descendant—­collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same English empirical humour of life—­of Thomas Overbury’s A Wife (1614—­only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle’s Microcosmographie (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard’s Chrestoleros* (1598), in verse.  It is an early instance of the stringing together, in a connected narrative, of the material previously used only in short sketches or “characters”; and so it is directly in the succession which in the end produced what is perhaps the most enduring and individual phenomenon in our literature—­the English novel.

  * A copy of the very rare first edition fetched L155 at the
  Britwell sale in February 1922.