As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe: such is Bunyan.

And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection perhaps; for their delight certainly.

If this is not the being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.
We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which have been referred to above.
In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unimportant in itself.

Its author was Henry Neville, of the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times.

The grandson had had a life of some stir earlier.