For the greatest of Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division, and comes best here.

One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false.

And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two.

It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of travel.

And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and both close to Addison and Steele.
Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but certainly earlier in part).