Richardson, though he had found the universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.
Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead, and in which it would not be effective.

But he had been exclusively English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the novel to come.

Taking the three together (not without due allowance for the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no character.

One great further development, impossible at this time, of the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was soon, though very awkwardly, tried.

It could not yet be born because the historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was rather scanty.