conformably to the times, he is named Berontus) rather than a prince borrowed from Astrée, and who satirizes herself soberly for scorning him, who meets her ideal lover with a business letter rather than in a shipwreck, and who level-headedly fends him off because he is both married and a would-be philanderer, is a rarity indeed.

Olinda commends itself to the student of English literary history principally for two reasons: because it so ably anticipates in embryo so many features which the English domestic and realistic novel would develop in its age of maturity and popularity, and because we do not yet understand, and need to investigate, the cultural factors—literary, social, and economic—which prevented the kind of achievement it represents from being duplicated with any frequency for several decades.

Queens College, City University of New York

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York, 1968), p. 4. viii

1.

viii

2. Advertised in the Term Catalogues, Trinity Term, 1693 (II, 466); Wing L1784, L1785.

2.

3. It is listed in Harold C. Binkley, "Letter Writing in English Literature" (unpublished Harvard dissertation, 1923).

3.

4. They included Familiar Letters [of] Rochester (2 vols., 1697), Familiar and Courtly Letters [of] Voiture (2 vols., 1700), A Pacquet from Will's (2nd ed., 1705), The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown (2-4 vols., 1707—), and The Lady's Pacquet of Letters (1710). Briscoe was not in every case the printer of the first edition.

4.

5. "A Cologne. Chez *****. MDCXCV." A copy of the volume is in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsénal in Paris.

5.

l'Arsénal

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