prose-fiction than Johnson was for the graceful eighteenth-century essay
or than Peele and Greene were for the acted drama. Perhaps it is a
consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer
itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the
plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered
to be characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.

In her encroaching on the domain of the other muses, the prose-epic has
annexed far more from her comic and tragic sisters than from any of the
other six. An opportunity for a most interesting inquiry awaits the
alert scholar who shall undertake to tell the rivalry of the novel and
the play, tracing their influence on each other and making a catalog of
their mutual borrowings. Altho the record has no special significance,
it may be noted that they have never hesitated to filch plots from each
other, the playwrights appropriating the inventions of the novelists and
the novelists levying on the works of the playwrights,--Shakspere, the
dramatist, finding the action of his 'As You Like It' ready to his hand
in a tale of Lodge's, and Le Sage, the story-teller, in his 'Gil Blas'
availing himself of scenes from Spanish comedies.

Far deeper, however, than any purloining of material are other
interrelations of the novel and the play, which have been continually
influencing one another, even when there was no hint of any plagiarism
of subject-matter. The older of the two, the drama, long served as the
model of prose-fiction; and not a few of the earlier practitioners of
the later art began their literary careers as writers for the
theater,--Le Sage for one, and, for another, Fielding. It is not to be
wondered at that they were inclined to approach the novel a little as
tho it were a play, and to set their characters in motion with only a
bare and summary indication of the appropriate environment. They were