Excerpt from The English Novel Before the Nineteenth Century: Excerpts From Representative Types<br><br>The introduction is not intended as an epitomized history of English fiction, but simply as a convenient guide to be used in connection with the excerpts in placing them historically and in showing what they illustrate technically.<br><br>In regard to the particular excerpts made, it may be said that the editors, while realizing the place in the growth of the novel of such contributary forms as the tale in all periods, the char acter-writing and epistolary narratives of the seventeenth, and the narrative essays of the eighteenth, century, felt that to increase the illustration with such material would be to exceed the limits of a single volume; therefore it seemed wiser to keep to the main channel of development.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.