Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from The House of the Wulfings (1889) to The Sundering Flood, published after the author's death in 1898, were actual romances—written in a kind of modernised fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover, perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with shams—even his socialism was not that—and they were in reality a revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best—probably the best of all is The Well at the World's End (1896)—have an extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work, sooner or later.

Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general standard of excellence in fiction is higher to-day than ever it was before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative completeness.

Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor "Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.

But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on perfectly firm ground—ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in surety now.

We have seen, then, that the prose novel—a late growth both in ancient and in modern times in all countries—was a specially late and slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's Early English Prose Romances is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably from its uncomfortably meteoric position, and some other things help: but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no possible sleight of weighing. 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. People have almost left off shaking their heads over the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom "reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in "Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to share that appellation with the newspaper.

Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the average novel did not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of the whole period passed before the two systems—of the pure novel and the novel-romance—were discovered: and even then they were not at once put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself. Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of that population who were likely to—who indeed could—read, and for the inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period—the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death which the last century—or the last three-quarters of it—has seen. The average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out thing—one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism in detail—than even the best of the works of the earlier division outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books—faulty, only partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores—very often have a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some minor books of this period, for this very reason.

But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been able to make Henry into a story of real interest that might hold the reader as even second-class Trollope—say a book like Orley Farm—does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all, there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact, with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably there is none.

The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott—one with which the non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the historical—was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley—a critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any rate—has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent; you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will emerge at once.

Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published Waverley he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he wanted at the time and in the place.

But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be long to perscribe—descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply something like a universal novel language. He did this, not as Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really universal language which fits all times and persons because it is universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:—that is to say by constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this latter. For historical creations (the most important of his non-historic, Guy Mannering and the Antiquary, were so near his own time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be "up-to-date"—St. Ronan's Well.

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days, appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in St. Ronan's Well: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously adequate: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is but a Rutland to his Yorkshire—or rather to his England or his world—she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is exhausted—if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the basins—everything—can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in her. Even her young men—certainly not her greatest successes—are by no means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of Persuasion, the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself published anything, by a young English lady—a lady if ever there was one and English if any person ever was—in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton. They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation—Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise—Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephistopheles—who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention—did in another matter three hundred years before.

That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing—was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various kinds—work especially admirable if we remember that there was no general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere, about 1830. If it were in any way possible—similar supposings have been admitted in literature very often—it would be extremely interesting to take a person ex hypothesi fairly acquainted with the rest of literature—English, foreign, European, and classical—but who knew nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat, even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, ex hypothesi furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them) would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name was Emma) who wrote Whitefriars and other historical romances in the forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like The Dutch in the Medway and The Camp of Refuge—if, I say, you gave him these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude—the holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to get through Pickwick" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough, and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it "describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of society" that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus. What he gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm. But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy—as much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no doubt to Dickens's real power—though perhaps not to his readers' perspicacity—that he made them believe that he intended a "state of society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society" always—whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth—which existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here. Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till Great Expectations at least, never achieved and I believe never attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift—a characteristic—it never distinguished novelists till after the middle of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book Emilia Wyndham, which has been already more than once referred to. It was written in 1845 and appeared next year—the year of Vanity Fair. But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was fifty-five when she wrote Emilia. The not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing, could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an extravagant establishment, a father practically non compos, not a penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been mixed up with her father's affairs—a man middle-aged, apparently dry as his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently, perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic; Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."

Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities—Mr. Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel—even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens—up to the date. The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr. Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking, original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]

[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, Norman's Bridge, has strong suggestions of John Halifax, and is ten years older.

But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.

Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things—so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else. The very central cause and essence of it—most definitely and most keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people—is the human delight in humanity—the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of the present living, acting, speaking as they do—but in each case with the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art. It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower place—it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art—to redress the apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of Nature—to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal among all the kinds of Art itself.



INDEX

Adam Bede Adams, W. Addison Adeline Mowbray Aelfric Agathos Ainsworth, H. Alton Locke Amadis Amelia Amis and Amillion Amory, Thomas Anabasis, The Anglo-Saxon, Romance in Anna Anna St. Ives Apollonius of Tyre Apuleius Arblay, Madame d', see Burney, F. Arcadia, The Aretina Arthour and Merlin Arthurian Legend, the; its romantic concentration Ask Mamma Ass, The Golden Atlantis, The New Austen, Miss

Badman, Mr. Bage, R. Balzac Banim Barchester Towers Barrett, E.S. Barry Lyndon "Barsetshire Novels," the Battle of the Books, The Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, B. Beckford Behn, Afra Belinda Bennett, Mrs. Bentivolio and Urania Beowulf Bergerac, C. de Berington, S. Berkeley Berners, Lord Bertrams, The Beryn, The Tale of Besaut, Sir W. Betsy Thoughtless Bevis of Hampton Black, W. Blackmore, R.D. Blair Borrow, George Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery Brambletye House Bronte, Charlotte Emily and Anne Brooke, H. Brunetiere, M. Brunton, Mrs. Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton) Buncle, The life of John Bunyan Burney, F. Byrne, Mrs. Byron

Caleb Williams Cambridge Freshman, The Camilla Canterbury Tales (the Misses Lee's) Can You Forgive Her? Captain Singleton Castle of Otranto, The Catherine Catriona Caxtons, The Cecilia Chamier, Captain Charles O'Malley "Charlotte Elizabeth" Chateaubriand, 152 Children of the Abbey, The Chrestien de Troyes Chronicles of Carlingford, The Chrysal Circulating libraries, effort of Clarissa Clive, Mrs. A. Cloister and the Hearth, The Coleridge Collins, Wilkie Colonel Jack Complaint of Deor, The Congreve Convent of Grey Penitents, The Coventry, F. "Coverley Papers," the Craik, Mrs. Cranford Cripps the Carrier Crisp, "Daddy" Croker, Crofton Croly Crotchet Castle Crowe, Mrs. Crowne, John Croxall, Dr. Cumberland, R. Cyropaedia, The

Dante David Simple Defoe Dickens Diderot Discipline Disraeli, B. Divina Commedia, The Dumas Dunlop

Edgeworth, Miss Ellis, G., Early English Romances Emare Emilia Wyndham Emma English Rogue, The Esmond Euphues Eustathius Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot") Evelina

_Fair Quaker of Dea _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ Ferrier, Miss Fielding, H. Fielding, S. _Florence of Rome_ _Florice and Blancheflour_ _Fool of Quality, The_ Ford, Emmanuel _Fortunes of Nigel, The_ _Frank_ _Frank Fairlegh_ _Frank Mildmay_

Galt Gamekeeper at Home, The Gaskell, Mrs. Gawain and the Green Knight Geoffrey of Monmouth "George Eliot," see Evans, M.A. Gilpin Glascock, Capt. Godwin, W. Goldsmith Gore, Mrs. Graves, Rev. R. Gray Great Hoggarty Diamond, The Green, Sarah Grey, Mr. W.W. Gryll Grange Guadentio di Lucca Gulliver's Travels Guy Livingstone Guy of Warwick

Hagiology, its effect on Romance Hamilton, Anthony Hardy, Mr. Haunted and the Haunters, The Havelok the Dam Haywood, Eliza Hazlitt Head, R. Heir of Redclyffe, The Heliodorus Henley, Mr. W.E. Henrietta Temple Henry Hereward the Wake Hermsprong Herodotus Heroine, The Holcroft, T. Holy War, The Hook, Theodore Hope Horn, King Humphry Clinker Hunt, Leigh Hypatia

Idalia Ida of Athena Iliad The "Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction) Inchbald, Mrs. Incognita Ingelo, N. Ipomydon Isle of Pines, The Italian, The It is Never too Late to Mend Ixion

Jack Wilton Jacob Faithful James, G.P.R. Jane Eyre Jefferies, R. Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy John Runcle John Inglesand Johnson, Dr. Johnstone, C. Jonathan Wild "Jorrocks," Mr. Joseph Andrews Journey from This World to the Next, A

Kate Coventry Kingsley, C. Kingsley, H. King's Own, The Kirkman, F.

"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu) Lady Susan Lancelot (of the Laik), the Scots Last Chronicle of Barset, The Lawrence, G.A. Layamon Lee, the Misses "L.E.L." Lennox, Mrs. Leoline and Sydanis Letter-form in novels Lever, C. Lewis, M.G. Libertine, The Livy Lockhart London Longus Lorna Doone Lucian Lybius Disconus Lydia Lyly Lytton, see Bulwer

Macaulay Macdonald, George Macfarlane, C. Mackenzie, Henry Mackenzie, Sir George Malory Man as He Is Manley, Mrs. Man of Feeling, The Mansfield Park Map, W. Marianne (Marivaux) Marivaux Marryat, Captain Marsh, Mrs. Martineau, Mrs. Mary Barton Maturin, C.R. Melincourt Melmoth the Wanderer Melville, Mr. L. Memoirs of a Cavalier Meredith, Mr. George Merlin Michelet Mill on the Floss, The Misfortunes of Elphin, The Mr. Midshipman Easy Mr. Verdant Green Mrs. Veal Moll Flanders Monk, The Montelion Moore, Dr. John Morgan, Lady Morier Morley of Blackburn, Lord Morris, W. Morte d'Arthur, the alliterative; the metrical; Malory's Mosse, Henrietta Mount Henneth Mysteries of Udolpho, The

Nash, T. Nature and Art Neville, H. Nightmare Abbey No Name North and South Northanger Abbey Novelist, The Novella, the Italian, influence of

Oceana Odyssey, The Old English Baron, The Old Manor House, The Oliphant, Mrs. Opie, Mrs. Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Ormond Ornatus and Artesia Oroonoko "Ouida" Ovid

Paget, F. Palace of Pleasure, Painter's Paltock, R. Pamela Pandion and Amphigeneia Paris, M. Gaston Parismus and Parismenus Parthenissa Paul Ferroll Peacock, T.L. Peep at Our Ancestors Pendennis Peregrine Pickle Persuasion Peter Simple Peter Wilkins Petronius Phantasies Pharonnida Pickwick Papers, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Plato Poe, Edgar Polite Conversation (Swift's) Pompey the Little Porter, Miss Pride and Prejudice Proud King, The Publication, system of

Queenhoo Hall Quixote, The Female Quixote, The Spiritual

Rabelais Radcliffe, Mrs. Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter Rasselas Reade, C. Recess, The Reeve, Clara Rice, James Richard Coeur de Lion Richardson Ritson Robinson Crusoe Robinson, Emma (?) Roche, R.M. Roderich Random Romance; its connection with the "Saint's Life"; not completely separable from novel; heroic Romance Readers and Romance Writers Romola "Rosa Matilda" Roxana Ruin, The Ruth

St. Irvyne St. Leon St. Ronan's Well Sayings and Doings "S.G.," see Green, Sarah Scott, Michael Scott, Sir W. Sense and Sensibility Sentimental Journey, A Seven Wise Masters, The Sewell, Miss Shabby Genteel Story, A Shadow of the Cross, The Shadwell, Charles Shebbeare Shelley Sheridan, Frances Sherwood, Mrs. Shirley Shortest Way with the Dissenters Simple Story, A Sir Amadas Sir Charles Grandison Sir Eglamour Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel Sir John Chiverton Sir Isumhras Sir Lancelot Greaves Sir Launfal Sir Orfeo Sir Triamond Sketches by Boz Smart, Capt. H. Smedley, Frank Smith, Charlotte Smith, Horace Smollett Socrates Spiritual Quixote, The Squire of Low Degree, The Stael, Mme. de Steele Stendhal Sterne Stevenson, R.L. Strange Story, A Stuart, Lady L. Surtees, R. Swift Sydney Biddulph

Tale of a Tub, A Ten Thousand a Year Tennyson Terror-Novel, the Thackeray Thaddeus of Warsaw Thorns Tolstoi, Count Tom and Jerry Tom Brown's Schooldays Tom Cringle's Log Tom Jones Tourguenief "Tractarian" Novel, the Treasure Island Tristram Shandy Tristram story, the Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Two Years Ago

Unfortunate Traveller, The Urania Utopia

Vanity Fair Vathek Venetia Vicar of Wake field, The Virgil Vision of St. Paul, The Voyage Round the World

Wace Walpole, H. Wanderer, The Warden, The Ward's Catalogue of Romances Warren, S. Water Babies, The Watsons, The Waverley Weber Well at the World's End Westward Ho! Whyte-Melville, G.J. Wild Irish Girl, The Wilkinson, Sarah William of Palerne Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., see "Lady Mary" Wroth, Lady Mary Wuthering Heights

Xenophon

Yeast Yonge, Miss Ywain and Gawain

Zastrozzi Zeluco

THE END