As for Roxana there are few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and the chief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads on which their respective adventures are strung.

Even Robinson himself enlists no particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind.

Yet these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God, we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after a reasonable interval.
This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly set a-working in the mediaeval romance, then mostly lost, and now recovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe.
It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott.

But Defoe is really (unless we put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as though they actually existed.
The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a temptation to end this chapter with him.

But to do so would cause an inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages.