Not only could the "Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description even more: but it is truest of all of the characters.

Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and familiar manners.

It is true that Addison, partly owing to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter.

His characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are works of art.

But in most of the points just mentioned he has exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not.