Just as the Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as had never been given before.

Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of such a novel as had never been written before.
But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style.

Not merely so long as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were not.

You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of Shakespeare.

Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal.