[1] The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old manuscripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir Walter Scott in memory of the old lover of poetry.
[CHAPTER XXX.]
GEORGIAN PROSE.
I.
The Great Novelists.
The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic" romances; Bunyan's stories are religious and moral novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles's adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H— G—," Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles, the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott produced "Waverley" (1814).
The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all denominations.