Still, as we have seen, this did not matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _ad eundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.
Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more still eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-period really opened.

It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons born when others were still living who drew their first breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world.

How soon it grew to a popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.
Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out of, or read them in, public libraries.

I do not know whether there exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I dare say it does.

I should not at all wonder if this total ran into scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would certainly do so.