Readers must go for it to books on the subject.

It is possible here merely to draw attention to those authors to whom the English novel as a more or less fixed form is indebted for its peculiar characteristics.

Foremost amongst these are Richardson and Fielding; after them there is Walter Scott.

After him, in the nineteenth century, Dickens and Meredith and Mr.Hardy; last of all the French realists and the new school of romance.

To one or other of these originals all the great authors in the long list of English novelists owe their method and their choice of subject-matter.
With Defoe fiction gained verisimilitude, it ceased to deal with the incredible; it aimed at exhibiting, though in strange and memorable circumstances, the workings of the ordinary mind.