[3]. A curious circumstance in connection with the first reading of the Diary is worth mentioning. An indefatigable student, it is said, toiled at its decipherment from twelve to fourteen hours a day for the space of three or four years. All the while—such is the strange untowardness of earthly things—Pepys had left in his library a long-hand transcript of his short-hand account of Charles the Second’s escape, and this, had it been known at the time, would have served the purpose of the required key.
[4]. This is a tragi-comedy by Dryden, written partly in blank verse, partly in rhyme. Pepys had seen it performed some two years before, and had then pronounced it “a very innocent and most pretty witty play.”
[5]. Taking always in my own study of literature the wider line of inquiry just indicated, I am grateful to Professor Royce for pointing out the connection between two phenomena apparently so radically diverse as the spread of prose fiction and the appearance of the Lockian philosophy. (See his delightful volume—a model of popular exposition—“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,” pp. 80-81.)
[6]. The reader of Pepys, recalling Mrs. Pepys’s fondness for these interminable stories, will remember that, as we have seen, “Le Grand Cyrus” once gave rise to considerable unpleasantness between husband and wife.
[7]. Novel-readers will not need to be reminded that the “story-within-story” device survived long after the classical-heroic romance had passed into oblivion. It is employed, for instance, by both Fielding and Smollett, and traces of it are to be found in the earlier work of Dickens, and in other writers quite near our own time.
[8]. A delightfully witty account of this work, and of the classical-heroic romance at large, will be found in Jusserand’s “English Novel in the Time of Shakspere,” a book which combines with the erudition of the German specialist the verve, tact, and lucidity of the French—qualities which are commonly to be sought in vain in the voluminous and too often chaotic lucubrations of Teutonic scholarship.
[9]. Translations of several of the great French romances, including “Clelia,” “which opened of itself in the place that described two lovers in a bower,” are given in the list of books on Leonora’s shelves (“Spectator,” No. 37); and suggestive mention is made of “Pharamond” and “Cassandra” as late as 1711 (“Spectator,” No. 92). Mrs. Lennox’s satire, “The Female Quixote,” may be taken to show that even in 1752 these works were still sometimes read.
[10]. Common fairness leads me to state, though it must be in the quasi-obscurity of a foot-note, that in any exhaustive treatment of the Restoration novel, place should be found for a third female name—that of Swift’s “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman,” Mrs. Haywood. But though this lady produced, between 1720 and 1730, a number of short stories that might fittingly be touched upon here, her best-known works, “The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” (1751) and “The History of Jeremy and Jenny Jessamy” (1754), belong to the times of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and therefore to another school and period of fiction entirely. She would thus be very likely to tempt us too far afield for the purposes we have here in view.
[11]. Scott’s edition of Swift’s works (1824), vol. ii., p. 303, note.
[12]. This is the name under which Mrs. Behn enters the satire of Pope:-