afterwards discovered how to make letters interesting by stringing them upon a story. They became a prolonged religious tract, which also happened to be a great romance. Both Defoe and Richardson being men of genius, they founded a new literary genus. But the cause of their immediate success was that they were frankly suiting the taste of a new class of readers. Addison and Pope thought first of gentlemen and scholars, and could not condescend to lower their dignity for readers who cared nothing for the high court of criticism. Voltaire, as M. Texte observes, did not see Defoe in England. Voltaire's friends, that is, were in the upper circle, to which Defoe was utterly inadmissible, and who partly shared Congreve's wish to be regarded as gentlemen, not as authors. To Swift, Defoe was the fellow who stood in the pillory—'I forget his name'; and Pope pleasantly calls him 'earless' and 'unabashed.' To see him, it would have been necessary to descend into the slums. Richardson was eminently respectable, but bishops and deans still write to 'good Mr. Richardson,' with the condescension of great dons recognising merit in a humble, self-taught scribbler. His work was suited for the inhabitants of Salisbury Court, not
