A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

and things like it are poetry, I admit myself, with a sad humility, to be wholly destitute of poetical appreciation.

The Church of England contributed two admirable verse writers of this period in Henry Cary and Reginald Heber. Cary, who was born in 1772 and was a Christ Church man, was long an assistant librarian in the British Museum. His famous translation of the Divina Commedia, published in 1814, is not only one of the best verse translations in English, but, after the lapse of eighty years, during which the study of Dante has been constantly increasing in England, in which poetic ideas have changed not a little, and in which numerous other translations have appeared, still attracts admiration from all competent scholars for its combination of fidelity and vigour. Heber, born in 1783 and educated at Brasenose, gained the Newdigate with Palestine, a piece which ranks with Timbuctoo and a few others among unforgotten prize poems. He took orders, succeeding to the family living of Hodnet, and for some years bid fair to be one of the most shining lights of the English Church, combining admirable parochial work with good literature, and with much distinction as a preacher. Unfortunately he thought it his duty to take the Bishopric of Calcutta when it was offered him; and, arriving there in 1824, worked incessantly for nearly two years and then died. His Journal in India is very pleasant reading, and some of his hymns rank with the best in English.

Ebenezer Elliott, the "Corn-Law Rhymer," was born in Yorkshire on 7th March 1781. His father was a clerk in an iron-foundry. He himself was early sent to foundry work, and he afterwards became a master-founder at Sheffield. From different points of view it may be thought a palliation—and the reverse—of the extreme virulence with which Elliott took the side of workmen against landowners and men of property, that he attained to affluence himself as an employer, and was never in the least incommoded by the "condition-of-England" question. He early displayed a considerable affection for literature, and was one, and about the last, of the prodigies whom Southey, in his inexhaustible kindness for struggling men of letters, accepted. Many years later the Laureate wrote good-naturedly to Wynn: "I mean to read the Corn-Law Rhymer a lecture, not without some hope, that as I taught him the art of poetry I may teach him something better." The "something better" was not in Elliott's way; for he is a violent and crude thinker, with more smoke than fire in his violence, though not without generosity of feeling now and then, and with a keen admiration of the scenery—still beautiful in parts, and then exquisite—which surrounded the smoky Hades of Sheffield. He himself acknowledges the influence of Crabbe and disclaims that of Wordsworth, from which the cunning may anticipate the fact that he is deeply indebted to both. His earliest publication or at least composition, "The Vernal Walk," is said to date from the very year of the Lyrical Ballads, and of course owes no royalty to Wordsworth, but is in blank verse, a sort of compound of Thomson and Crabbe. "Love" (in Crabbian couplets slightly tinged with overlapping) and "The Village Patriarch" (still smacking of Crabbe in form, though irregularly arranged in rhymed decasyllables) are his chief other long poems. He tried dramas, but he is best known by his "Corn-Law Rhymes" and "Corn-Law Hymns," and deserves to be best known by a few lyrics of real beauty, and many descriptions. How a man who could write "The Wonders of the Lane" and "The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom" could stoop to malignant drivel about "palaced worms," "this syllabub-throated logician," and so forth, is strange enough to understand, especially as he had no excuse of personal suffering. Even in longer poems the mystery is renewed in "They Met Again" and "Withered Wild Flowers" compared with such things as "The Ranter," though the last exhibits the author at both his best and worst. However, Elliott is entitled to the charity he did not show; and the author of such clumsy Billingsgate as "Arthur Bread-Tax Winner," "Faminton," and so forth, may be forgiven for the flashes of poetry which he exhibits. Even in his political poems they do not always desert him, and his somewhat famous Chartist (or ante-Chartist) "Battle-Song" is as right-noted as it is wrong-headed.

Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), a poet and the father of a poet still alive, was a friend and follower of Wordsworth, and the author of sonnets good in the Wordsworthian kind. But he cannot be spared much room here; nor can much even be given to the mild shade of a poetess far more famous in her day than he. "Time that breaks all things," according to the dictum of a great poet still living, does not happily break all in literature; but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments the once not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. She was born (her maiden name was Felicia Dorothea Browne) at Liverpool on 25th September 1794, and when she was only eighteen she married a Captain Hemans. It was not a fortunate union, and by far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans' married life was spent, owing to no known fault of hers, apart from her husband. She did not live to old age, dying on 26th April 1835. But she wrote a good deal of verse meanwhile—plays, poems, "songs of the affections," and what not. Her blameless character (she wrote chiefly to support her children) and a certain ingenuous tenderness in her verse, saved its extreme feebleness from severe condemnation in an age which was still avid of verse rather than discriminating in it; and children still learn "The boy stood on the burning deck," and other things. It is impossible, on any really critical scheme, to allow her genius; but she need not be spoken of with any elaborate disrespect, while it must be admitted that her latest work is her best—always a notable sign. "Despondency and Aspiration," dating from her death-year, soars close to real sublimity; and of her smaller pieces "England's Dead" is no vulgar thing.

Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of Tennyson and the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or twilight of poetry, of which one of its strangest if not least illuminative stars or meteors, Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncomplimentary picture in a letter: "owls' light" he calls it, with adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; Scott, Campbell, and Moore, were all living, but the poetic production of all had on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have been in time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun and moon of the time; but they had died before Byron. So the firmament was occupied by rather wandering stars: some of them elders already noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years between Keats (1795) and the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). The chief of these were the pair of half-serious, half-humorous singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public estimation come Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor, the Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Horne, and the first Lord Lytton; while a third class—of critics' rather than readers' favourites—varying in merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking higher than any of the above, may be made up of George Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire poet Barnes, Beddoes, Charles Whitehead, R. S. Hawker, and Thomas Wade. To the second class must be added "L. E. L.," the poetess who filled the interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning.

Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without disrespect as, if not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. Persons of more or less distinction (and of less or more crotchet) have at different times paid very high compliments to the Joseph and his Brethren (1823, revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879), a friend of Keats, and a person who seems to have lived much as he pleased; to the Solitary of Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel, who also showed talent as a novelist and miscellanist; and to the Mundi et Cordis Carmina (1835) of Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the greatest poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on the one hand uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and on the other has read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, could put any one of them very high. All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not poets; they were only poetical curiosities.

Darley, Beddoes, and Horne belong in the main to the same class, but rise high, in one case immeasurably, above them. George Darley (1795-1846) is perhaps our chief English example of "the poet who dies in youth while the man survives," and who becomes a critic. In him, however, the generation of the critic did not wait for the corruption of the poet. An Irishman, and of Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the staff of the London Magazine, and wrote much verse bad and good, including the once famous "I've been Roaming," of which it is safe to say that not one in ten of those who have sung it could tell the author. His best work is contained in the charming pastoral drama of Sylvia (1827) and the poem entitled Nepenthe (1839). He was a good but rather a savage critic, and edited Beaumont and Fletcher. His work has never been collected, nor, it is believed, ever fully published; and it has the marks of a talent that never did what was in it to do, and came at an unfortunate time. Some not bad judges in the forties ranked Darley with Tennyson in poetic possibilities, and thought the former the more promising of the two.

Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult to write about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on the one hand and criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, born at Clifton on 20th July 1803. He was the son of a very famous physician, and of Anna Edgeworth, the youngest sister of the whole blood to the novelist. Beddoes, left fatherless at six years old, was educated at the Charterhouse and at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when he was barely of age went to Germany to study medicine, living thenceforth almost entirely on the Continent. Before this he had published two volumes, The Improvisatore and The Bride's Tragedy; but his principal work is a wild Elizabethan play called Death's Jest-Book or The Fool's Tragedy, which he never absolutely finished. He died in 1848 at Basle by a complicated and ghastly kind of suicide. Three years later his Poems appeared, and they have been recently republished, with additions and a curious collection of letters.

Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish poet deriving from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree with this. His very earliest work, written when he could not know much either of Shelley or Keats, shows as they do technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But this is quite dropped later; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but inspiration. In this inspiration he does not follow, but shares with, his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counterpart to Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his works are naught, or naught but nightmares; though Death's Jest-Book, despite its infinite disadvantages from constant rewriting and uncertainty of final form, has a strong grasp. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century none but Blake and Coleridge had given. Beddoes does not seem to have been at all a pleasant person, and in his later days at any rate he would appear to have been a good deal less than sane. But the author of such things as the "Dirge for Wolfram" ("If thou wilt ease thine heart") in Death's Jest-Book, and the stanza beginning "Dream-Pedlary," "If there were dreams to sell," with not a few others of the same kind, attains to that small and disputed—but not to those who have thought out the nature of poetry disputable—class of poets who, including Sappho, Catullus, some mediæval hymn-writers, and a few moderns, especially Coleridge, have, by virtue of fragments only, attained a higher position than many authors of large, substantive, and important poems. They may be shockingly lacking in bulk, in organisation, in proper choice of subject, in intelligent criticism of life; but they are like the summer lightning or the northern aurora, which, though they shine only now and then, and only it may be for a few moments, shine, when they do shine, with a beauty unapproachable by gas or candle, hardly approached by sun or moon, and illuminate the whole of their world.

Although quotation is in the main impossible in this book, Beddoes, despite the efforts of his friend Kelsall, of Mr. Swinburne, of Mr. Gosse (thanks to whom a quasi-complete edition has at last appeared), and others, is still so little known, that a short one may be allowed in his case. I have known a critic who said deliberately of the above-mentioned stanza in "Dream-Pedlary"—

that these ten lines contain more pure poetry than the entire works of Byron. And the same touch will be found not merely in the "Wolfram Dirge" mentioned—

but in several other dirges (for the dirge is the form natural to Beddoes), in the "Song from Torrismond," in "Love in Idleness," in the "Song on the Water" (which is pure early Tennyson), in the exquisite "Threnody," and in many other things. They have been called artificial: the epithet can be allowed in no other sense than in that in which it applies to all the best poetry. And they have the note, which only a few true but imperfect poets have, of anticipation. Shadows before, both of Tennyson and Browning, especially of the latter, appear in Beddoes. But after all his main note is his own: not theirs, not the Elizabethan, not Shelley's, not another's. And this is what makes a poet.

As Beddoes' forte lay in short and rather uncanny snatches, so that of Richard Hengist Horne lay in sustained and dignified composition. He was not christened Hengist at all, but Henry. He had a curious life. In youth he knew Keats and Wells, having been, like them, at the private school of Mr. Clarke at Edmonton. He went to Sandhurst and was expelled for insubordination; joined the Mexican navy in the war of liberation; travelled widely; but seemed at about five and twenty to be settling down to literature and journalism in England. After writing various things, he produced in 1837 the fine but not quite "live" plays of Cosmo de Medici and The Death of Marlowe, and in 1843 the famous farthing epic, Orion, which was literally published at a farthing. This was the smallest part of a great literary baggage of very unequal value. In 1852 Horne, resuming the life of adventure, went to Australia, served in the gold police, and stayed at the Antipodes till 1869. Then he came home again and lived for fifteen years longer, still writing almost to his very death on 13th March 1884.

It is not true that Orion is Horne's only work of value; but it is so much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic of him, that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And it is an example of the melancholy but frequently exemplified truth, that few things are so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring literary fame, as the production of some very good work among a mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet inferior stuff. I do not think it extravagant to say that if Horne had written nothing but Orion and had died comparatively young after writing it, he would have enjoyed very high rank among English poets. For, though doubtless a little weighted with "purpose," it is a very fine poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no means destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing some passion with more than some real satire. But the rather childish freak of its first publication probably did it no good, and it is quite certain that the author's long life and unflagging production did it much harm.

Of the other persons in the list above, Macaulay, Hartley Coleridge, and Lord Lytton are mainly something else than poets, and Talfourd, as a dramatist, will also be noticed elsewhere. Barnes and Hawker were both clergymen of the West of England: the former very highly ranked by some for his studies in Dorset dialect; the latter the author of the famous "Song of the Western Men" (long thought a genuine antique), of the exquisite "Queen Gwennyvar's Round," of the fine "Silent Tower of Bottreaux," of some beautiful sonnets, and of the stately "Quest of the Sangreal." Whether James Clarence Mangan, whose most famous poem is "Dark Rosaleen," a musical and mystic celebration of the charms and wrongs of Erin, is a great poet to whom Saxon jealousy has refused greatness for political reasons, or a not ungifted but not consummately distinguished singer who added some study to the common Irish gift of fluent, melodious verse-making, is a question best solved by reading his work and judging for the reader's self. It is not by any sane account so important that to dismiss it thus is a serious rifiuto, and it is probably impossible for Irish enthusiasm and English judgment ever to agree on the subject. Of "L. E. L." Sir Henry Taylor, Hood, and Praed, some more substantive account must be given.

Although it is not easy, after two generations, to decide such a point accurately, it is probable that "L. E. L." was the most popular of all the writers of verse who made any mark between the death of Byron in 1824 and the time when Tennyson definitely asserted himself in 1842. She paid for this popularity (which was earned not merely by her verse, but by a pretty face, an odd social position, and a sad and apparently, though it seems not really, mysterious end) by a good deal of slightly unchivalrous satire at the time and a rather swift and complete oblivion afterwards. She was born (her full name being Letitia Elizabeth Landon) in London on 14th August 1802, and was fairly well connected and educated. William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette (a man whose name constantly occurs in the literary history of this time, though he has left no special work except an Autobiography), was a friend of her family, and she began to write very early, producing novels and criticisms as well as verse in newspapers, in the albums and Souvenirs which were such a feature of the twenties and thirties, and in independent volumes. She was particularly active as a poet about 1824-35, when appeared the works whose titles—The Improvisatore, The Troubadour, The Golden Violet—suggested parodies to Thackeray. Her best novel is held to be Ethel Churchill, published in 1837. Next year she married Mr. Maclean, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle; and, going out with him to that not very salubrious clime, died suddenly in about two months. All sorts of ill-natured suggestions were of course made; but the late Colonel Ellis, the historian of the colony, seems to have established beyond the possibility of doubt that she accidentally poisoned herself with prussic acid, which she used to take for spasms of the heart.

It is tolerably exact, and it is not harsh, to say that "L. E. L." is a Mrs. Hemans with the influence of Byron added, not to the extent of any "impropriety," but to the heightening of the Romantic tone and of a native sentimentality. Her verse is generally musical and sweet: it is only sometimes silly. But it is too often characterised by what can but be called the "gush" which seems to have affected all the poetesses of this period except Sara Coleridge (1802-50) (who has some verses worthy of even her name in Phantasmion, her only independent book), and which appears in very large measure in the work of Mrs. Browning.

Sir Henry Taylor's poetical repute illustrates the converse of the proposition which is illustrated by that of Horne. It is probable that, if each is measured by his best things, Orion and Philip Van Artevelde, Horne must be allowed to be a good deal the better poet. But a placid official life enabled Taylor both to gain powerful friends and to devote himself to literature merely when and how he pleased. And so he has burdened his baggage with no mere hack-work. He was indeed a singularly lucky person. The son of a man of fair family but reduced fortune who had taken to farming, Henry Taylor began in the navy. But he disliked the service very much, and either obtained or received his discharge after only nine months' sea life as a mid-shipman during the year 1814. Then he entered the public store-keeper's department, but was ousted by rearrangements after four years' service. These beginnings were not very promising; but his father allowed him to stay quietly at home till by pure luck he obtained a third post under Government in the Colonial Office. This he held for nearly fifty years, during which it gave him affluence and by degrees a very high position, and left him abundance of time for society and letters. He resigned it in 1872, and died on 27th March 1886. He wrote some prose of various kinds, and just before his death published a pleasant autobiography. But his literary fame rests on a handful of plays and poems, all of them, except St. Clement's Eve, which did not appear till 1862, produced at leisurely intervals between 1827 (Isaac Comnenus) and 1847 (The Eve of the Conquest and other poems). The intervening works were Philip Van Artevelde (his masterpiece, 1834), Edwin the Fair (1842), some minor poems, and the romantic comedy of A Sicilian Summer (first called The Virgin Widow), which was published with St. Clement's Eve. He had (as, it may be noted curiously, had so many of the men of the transition decade in which he was born) a singular though scanty vein of original lyric snatch, the best example of which is perhaps the song "Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife" in Van Artevelde; but his chief appeal lay in a very careful study of character and the presentation of it in verse less icy than Talfourd's and less rhetorical than Milman's. Yet he had, unlike either of these, very little direct eye to the stage, and therefore is classed here as a poet rather than as a dramatist. There is always a public for what is called "thoughtful" poetry, and Taylor's is more than merely thoughtful. But it may be suspected by observers that when Robert Browning came into fashion Henry Taylor went out. Citations of Van Artevelde, if not of the other pieces (none of which are contemptible, while the two last, inferior in weight to their predecessors, show advance in ease and grace), are very frequent between 1835 and 1865: rare I think between 1865 and 1895.

And so we come at last to the twin poets, in the proper sense humorous,—that is to say, jesting with serious thoughts behind,—of the first division of this class. They were very close in many ways—indeed it is yet a moot point which of the two borrowed certain rhythms and turns of word and verse from the other, or whether both hit upon these independently. But their careers were curiously different; and, except in comparative length of life (if that be an advantage), Praed was luckier than his comrade. Thomas Hood, who was slightly the elder, was born in 1798 or 1799 (for both dates are given) in the Poultry; his father being a bookseller and publisher. This father died, not in good circumstances, when the son was a boy, and Thomas, after receiving some though not much education, became first a merchant's clerk and then an engraver, but was lucky enough to enjoy between these uncongenial pursuits a long holiday, owing to ill-health, of some three years in Scotland. It was in 1820 or thereabouts that he fell into his proper vocation, and, as sub-editor of the London Magazine, found vent for his own talents and made acquaintance with most of its famous staff. He married, wrote some of his best serious poems and some good comic work, and found that while the former were neglected the latter was eagerly welcomed. It was settled that, in his own pathetic pun, he was to be "a lively Hood for a livelihood" thenceforward. It is difficult to say whether English literature lost or gained, except from one very practical point of view; for Hood did manage to live after a fashion by his fun as he certainly could not have lived by his poetry. He had, however, a bare pittance, much bad health, and some extremely bad luck, which for a time made him, through no fault of his own, an exile. His last five years were again spent in England, and in comparative, though very comparative, prosperity; for he was editor first of the New Monthly Magazine, then of a magazine of his own, Hood's Monthly, and not long before his death he received from Sir Robert Peel a civil list pension of £100 a year. The death was due to consumption, inherited and long valiantly struggled with.

The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the other hand, was passed under sufficiently favourable stars. He was born in 1802, and his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed property, practice at the bar, and official position. Praed was sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of the famous school magazine The Etonian, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of Macaulay, and wrote in Knight's Quarterly. After a short interval of tutoring and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 1839. He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, and it was thought that, had he lived, he might have made a considerable political reputation both as speaker and administrator.

The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and the little sun and much shadow of the other have left traces—natural though less than might be supposed—of difference between the produce of the two men; but perhaps the difference is less striking than the resemblance. That Hood—obliged to write for bread, and outliving Praed by something like a decade at the two ends—wrote a great deal more than Praed did is of little consequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as the duty labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius: of this there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for Praed's advantages in scholarship and in social standing and accomplishment. In this serious work of Hood's—Lycus the Centaur, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, The Elm Tree, The Haunted House—there is observable—to a degree never surpassed by any of the poets of this group except Beddoes, and more sustained and human, though less weird and sweet, than his—a strain of the true, the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. At this Praed never arrives: there are at most in him touches which may seem to a very charitable judgment to show that in other circumstances sorrow, passion, or the like might have roused him to display the hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood's breeding, nor, I think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness, the delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed's best vers de société—the Season, the Letter of Advice, and the rest. This last bloom has never been quite equalled—even Prior's touch is coarse to it, even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. So too as there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation—generous and fine but a little theatrical—which endears Hood to the general in The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt, so there is nothing in Hood of the sound political sense, underlying apparent banter, of Praed's Speaker Asleep and other things.

But where the two poets come together, on a ground which they have almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous poetry ranging from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood's Miss Kilmansegg and Praed's Red Fisherman, to the simple, humorously tender study of characters, as in a hundred things of Hood's and in not a few of Praed's with The Vicar at their head. The resemblance here is less in special points than in a certain general view of life, conditioned in each case by the poet's breeding, temperament, and circumstance, but alike in essence and quality: in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of taking life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment. Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, partly by his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes both in mere fun and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the central substance is the same in both.

Yet one gift which Hood has and Praed has not remains to be noticed—the gift of exquisite song writing. Compared with the admired inanities of Barry Cornwall, his praised contemporary, Hood's "Fair Ines," his "Time of Roses," his exquisite "Last Stanzas," and not a few other things, are as gold to gilt copper. Praed has nothing to show against these; but he, like Hood, was no inconsiderable prose writer, while the latter, thanks to his apprenticeship to the burin, had an extraordinary faculty of illustrating his own work with cuts, contrary to all the canons, but inimitably grotesque.

It is probable that even in this long survey of the great poetical production of the first third of this century some gaps may be detected by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible to give more than the barest mention here to the "single speech" accident of Charles Wolfe, the author of the "Burial of Sir John Moore," which everybody knows, and of absolutely nothing else that is worth a single person's knowing; to the gigantic and impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone; to the industrious translation of Rose and Sotheby; to the decent worth of Caroline Bowles, and the Hood-and-water of Laman Blanchard. And there are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned; for there must be an end.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW FICTION

Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very considerable, and the talent displayed by at least some of the practitioners of the form distinctly great, it can hardly have been possible for any careful observer of it, either during the last ten years of the old age or the first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied with it on the whole, or to think that it had reached a settled or even a promising condition. Miss Burney (now Madame d'Arblay), whose brilliant début with Evelina was made just before the date at which this book begins, had just after that date produced Cecilia, in which partial and contemporary judges professed to see no falling off. But though she was still living and writing,—though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly half over,—Camilla (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful success, and The Wanderer (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after this did she attempt the style again.

The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for the philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt being made to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel of Godwin, Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in operation as concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder of which, Monk Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during the earlier part of the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert Maturin improved considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin was born in Ireland (where he principally lived) in 1782, and died there in 1824. He took orders, but was too eccentric for success in his profession, and his whole heart was set on literature and the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though very severely criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his tragedy of Bertram acted at Drury Lane with success; but his later theatrical ventures (Manuel, Fredolpho) were less fortunate. He also published sermons; but he lives in literature only by his novels, and not very securely by these. He produced three of them—The Fatal Vengeance: or, The Family of Montorio, The Wild Irish Boy, and the Milesian Chief—under a pseudonym before he was thirty; while after the success of Bertram he avowed Women (1818), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and The Albigenses (1824), the last in a sort of cross style between his earlier patterns and Scott. But his fame had best be allowed to rest wholly on Melmoth, a remarkable book dealing with the supposed selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged life; the bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce some one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long, marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts by the rant and the gush of its class, Melmoth is really a powerful book, which gave something more than a passing shudder to its own generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.

The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken these tales of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had begun to write some years before the close of the eighteenth century. But Miss Austen's books were long withheld from the press, and she was considerably preceded in publication by Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only novels of the first decade of the nineteenth century which have held any ground, though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales of terror but of fashionable novels, "Minerva Press" inanities, attempts in the bastard and unsuccessful kind of historical romance which preceded Scott's, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was born in 1767, the daughter of an eccentric busybody of good family and property in Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a great fame in her own day, deserved it, never entirely lost it, and has lately had it revived; while Scott declared (but in such matters Scott was a little apt to let his good-nature and his freedom from personal vanity get the better of strict critical truth) that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion of his Scotch ones. Her chief works in this kind were Castle Rackrent (1801), a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but a wonderful picture of the varieties of recklessness and misconduct which in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled most of the landlords of Ireland; Belinda (1803), her most ambitious and elaborate if not her most successful effort, which includes a very vivid and pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipation of the end of the last century; Tales of Fashionable Life, including the admirable Absentee; and Ormond, the most vivid of her Irish stories next to Castle Rackrent. She continued to write novels as late as 1834 (Helen), while some very charming letters of hers, though privately printed a good many years ago, were not published till 1894. Miss Edgeworth's father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters, and belonged to the class of Englishmen who, without imbibing French freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the French philosophes; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. Indirectly, however, this brought about in The Parent's Assistant, in other books for children, and in the Moral Tales, some of her most delightful work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned include Leonora, Harrington, Ennui, and Patronage, the longest of all) Miss Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between the eighteenth century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, and those of the nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. This is not merely, though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact that the society which she saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from the highest downwards) was itself in a kind of transition state: it was at least as much owing to a certain want of distinct modernness and distinct universality in her own character, thought, and style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of delightful talents falling little short of genius, and of much humour (which last is shown in the charming Essay on Irish Bulls, as well as in her novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest touches; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather types than individuals, she has not created many live persons, while sometimes she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in short, though extremely pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can tell a story to perfection, but does not often invent it perfectly; and by herself she can hardly be said to have originated anything, though of course, if we could accept the above quoted statement of Scott's, she indirectly originated a very great deal.

Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who was born at Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, being the daughter of the rector of that place, lived a quiet life chiefly at various places in her native county, frequented good society in the rank of not the richest country squires, to which her own family belonged, and died at Winchester unmarried on 24th July 1817. Of her six completed novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were published during the last seven years of her life, while Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared, for the first time with an author's name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or sudden popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the nineteenth century romance.

One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading. Northanger Abbey was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the bulk of Pride and Prejudice (which some hold to be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as Northanger Abbey. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of Camilla (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote Evelina was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day.

The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high compliment—a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic "Janites" have ventured—inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"

It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method, which, with the addition of a certain nescio quid, giving it its modern difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding and of Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either. It has the intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and full-blooded, livingness of Fielding, and it also has something not unlike a feminine counterpart and complement of his pervading irony; while it is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly nice and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is in the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift; and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray—even if it be not improper to use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than difference—in the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her irony indeed is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to appreciate it, and it is not uncommon to find those who consider such personages as Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice to be merely farcical, instead of, as they are in fact, preachers of the highest and most Shakespearian comedy. But there would be no room here to examine Miss Austen's perfections in detail; the important thing for the purposes of this history is to observe again that she "set the clock," so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on describing popular or passing fashions, amusements, politics; but confined herself to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in some fashion so to extract the characteristics of that life which are perennial and human, that there never can be any doubt to fit readers in any age finding themselves at home with her, just as they find themselves at home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And lastly, by some analogous process she hit upon a style which, though again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore now reviled as "stilted" and formal by those who have not the gift of literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in the merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern.

For the moment, however, Miss Austen's example had not so much little influence as none at all. A more powerful and popular force, coming immediately afterwards and coinciding with the bent of general taste, threw for the time the whole current of English novel writing into quite a different channel; and it was not till the first rush of this current had expended itself, after an interval of thirty or forty years, that the novel, as distinguished from the romance and from nondescript styles partaking now of the romance itself, now of something like the eighteenth century story, engaged the popular ear. This new development was the historical novel proper; and the hand that started it at last was that of Scott. At last—for both men and women had been trying to write historical novels for about two thousand years, and for some twenty or thirty the attempts had come tolerably thick and fast. But before Scott no one, ancient or modern, Englishman or foreigner, had really succeeded. In the first place, until the eighteenth century was pretty far advanced, the conception and the knowledge of history as distinguished from the mere writing and reading of chronicles had been in a very rudimentary condition. Exceedingly few historians and no readers of history, as a class and as a rule, had practised or acquired the art of looking at bygone ages with any attempt to realise and revive the ideas of those ages themselves, or even, while looking at them with the eyes of the present, to keep in mind that these were quite different eyes from those of contemporaries. In the same way no attempt at getting "local colour," at appropriateness of dialect, and so forth, had been made. These negligences in the hands of genius had been as unimportant as the negligences of genius always are. If Shakespeare's "godlike Romans" are not entirely free from anachronism, nobody of sense would exchange them for anything else than themselves; and though Dante practically repeated in the Commedia the curious confusion which in less gifted trouvères and romances mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne and blended Greek and Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this also was supremely unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting. But when, at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary powers at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeavoured to write historical novels, they all, from Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the merest gallimaufries of inaccurate history, questionable fiction, manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all dialogue destitute of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and drawn chiefly from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the time.

It is not possible—it never is in such cases—to give a very exact account of the causes which led Walter Scott, when the public seemed to be a little tiring of the verse-romances which have been discussed in the last chapter, to take to romances in prose. The example of Miss Edgeworth, if a true cause at all, could affect only his selection of Scotch manners to illustrate his histories, not his adoption of the historical style itself. But he did adopt it; and, fishing out from an old desk the beginnings of a story which he had left unfinished, or rather had scarce commenced, years earlier, he fashioned it into Waverley. This appearing in the year 1814 at a serious crisis in his own affairs, opened at once a new career of fame and fortune to him, and a previously unknown field of exploit and popularity to the English novel.

The extraordinary greatness of Scott—who in everything but pure style, and the expression of the highest raptures of love, thought, and nature, ranks with the greatest writers of the world—is not better indicated by any single fact than by the fact that it is impossible to describe his novels in any simple formula. He practically created the historical novel; and, what is more, he elaborated it to such an extent that no really important additions to his scheme have been made since. But not all his novels are historical. The two which immediately succeeded Waverley, and which perhaps the best judges consider his best,—Guy Mannering and The Antiquary,—have only the faintest touch of history about them, and might have none at all without affecting their excellence; while one of the most powerful of his later books, St. Ronan's Well, is almost absolutely virgin of fact. So also, though his incomparable delineation of national manners, speech, and character, of the cosas de Escócia generally, is one of the principal sources of his interest, Ivanhoe, which has perhaps been the most popular of all his books, Kenilworth, which is not far below it in popularity or in merit, and one or two others, have nothing at all of Scotland in them; and the altogether admirable romance of Quentin Durward, one of his four or five masterpieces, so little that what there is plays the smallest part in the success. So yet again, historical novelist as Scott is, and admirably as he has utilised and revivified history, he is by no means an extremely accurate historical scholar, and is wont not merely to play tricks with history to suit his story,—that is probably always allowable,—but to commit anachronisms which are quite unnecessary and even a little teasing.

There is no doubt that the single gift underlying all these and other things—the gift which enabled Scott not merely, as has been said, to create the historical novel, but to give the novel generally an entirely new start and direction, to establish its popularity, to clear its reputation from the smirch of frivolity on the one side and immorality on the other, to put it in the position occupied at other times or in other countries by the drama and the sermon, and to make it a rival of the very newspaper which was being refashioned at the same moment, while providing opportunities for the production of literature proper not inferior to those of any literary kind except poetry—that this was a gift of higher scope, if of vaguer definition, than any of those referred to. It was that gift which no one except Shakespeare has ever possessed in larger measure, though others have possessed it in greater partial intensity and perfection—the gift of communicating life to the persons, the story, the dialogue. To some extent Scott had this treasure in an earthen vessel. He could not, like Thackeray, like Fielding, like Miss Austen even, make everybody that he touched alive: his heroes very generally are examples to the contrary. And as a rule, when he did perform this function of the wizard,—a name given to him by a more than popular appropriateness,—he usually did it, not by the accumulation of a vast number of small strokes, but by throwing on the canvas, or rather panel, large outlines, free sweeps of line, and breadths of colour, instinct with vivacity and movement. Yet he managed wholly to avoid that fault of some creative imaginations which consists in personifying and individualising their figures by some easily recognisable label of mannerism. Even his most mannered characters, his humourists in the seventeenth century sense, of whom Dugald Dalgetty is the prince and chief—the true commander of the whole stift of this Dunkelspiel—stand poles asunder from those inventions of Dickens and of some others who are ticketed for us by a gesture or a phrase repeated ad nauseam. And this gift probably is most closely connected with another: the extraordinary variety of Scott's scene, character, and—so far as the term is applicable to his very effective but rather loose fashion of story-telling—plot. It is a common and a just complaint of novelists, especially when they are fertile rather than barren, that with them scene, plot, and character all run into a kind of mould, that their stories with a little trouble can be thrown into a sort of common form, that their persons simply "change from the blue bed to the brown," and that the blue and brown beds themselves are seen, under their diverse colours, to have a singular and not very welcome uniformity of pattern and furniture. Even Scott does not escape this almost invariable law of the brain-artist: it is one of the sole Shakespearian characteristics that Shakespeare does escape it entirely and altogether. A certain form of huddled and not altogether probable catastrophe, a knack of introducing in the earlier part of the story, as if big with fate, personages who afterwards play but a subordinate part, and one or two other things, might be urged against Sir Walter. But, on the whole, no artist is less chargeable with stereotype than he. His characters are hardly ever doubles; their relationships (certain general connections excepted, which are practically the scaffolding of the romance in itself) do not repeat themselves; the backgrounds, however much or however little strict local colour they may have, are always sufficiently differentiated. They have the variety, as they have the truth, of nature.

No detailed account can here be attempted of the marvellous rapidity and popularity of the series of novels from the appearance of Waverley till just before the author's death eighteen years later. The anecdotage of the matter is enormous. The books were from the first anonymous, and for some time the secret of their authorship was carefully and on the whole successfully preserved. Even several years after the beginning, so acute a judge as Hazlitt, though he did not entertain, thought it necessary seriously to discuss, the suggestion that Godwin wrote them,—a suggestion which, absurd as, with our illegitimate advantage of distance and perspective, we see it to be, was less nonsensical than it seems to those who forget that at the date of the appearance of Waverley there was no novelist who could have been selected with more plausibility. After a time this and that were put together, and a critic of the name of Adolphus constructed an argument of much ingenuity and shrewdness to show that the author of Marmion and the Lady of the Lake must be the author of Waverley. But the secret was never regularly divulged till Sir Walter's misfortunes, referred to in the section on his poetry, made further concealment not so much useless as impossible in the first place, and positively detrimental in the second. The series was dauntlessly continued, despite the drag of the Napoleon, the necessity of attempting other work that would bring in money, and above all the strain on the faculties both of imagination and labour which domestic as well as pecuniary misfortunes imposed. Nor did Scott, it may be fearlessly, asserted, though it is not perhaps the general opinion, ever publish any "dotages," with the possible exception of Castle Dangerous, which was not only finished but begun when the fatal disease of the brain which killed him had got the upper hand. The introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, written in 1827, is one of the most exquisite and masterly things that he ever did, though, from its not actually forming part of one of the novels, it is comparatively little known. The Fair Maid of Perth, a year later, has been one of the most popular of all abroad, and not the least so at home; and there are critics who rank Anne of Geierstein, in 1829, very high indeed. Few defenders are found for Count Robert of Paris, which was in fact written in the valley of the shadow; and it may be admitted that in his earlier days Scott would certainly have been able to give it a fuller development and a livelier turn. Yet the opening scene, though a little too long, the escape from the vaults of the Blachernal, and not a few other things, would be recognised as marvellous if they could be put before a competent but unbiassed taste, which knew nothing of Sir Walter's other work, but was able to compare it not merely with the work of his predecessors but with that of his imitators, numerous and enterprising as they were, at the time that Count Robert appeared.

In such a comparison Scott at his worst excels all others at their best. It is not merely that in this detail and in that he has the mastery, but that he has succeeded in making novel writing in general turn over a completely new leaf, enter upon a distinctly different competition. With the masterpieces of the eighteenth century novel he does not enter into comparison at all: he is working on a different scene, addressing a different audience, using different tools, colours, methods. Every successful novelist up to his time had, whatever his ostensible "temp. of tale," quietly assumed the thoughts, the speech, the manners, even to a great extent the dress and details of his own day. And in this assumption all but the greatest had inevitably estranged from them the ears and eyes of days that were not their own, which days, no doubt, were in turn themselves rapidly hastening to change, but never to revert to the original surroundings. Scott had done in prose fiction what the poets and the dramatists had sometimes done, what very rare philosophers had sometimes done likewise. Ostensibly going to the past, and to some extent really borrowing its circumstances, he had in reality gone straight to man as man; he had varied the particular trapping only to exhibit the universal substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long list of originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less eccentric companions from Fergus MacIvor to Queen Margaret, may derive part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from picturesque "business" and properties. But the chief of that appeal lies in the fact that they are all men and women of the world, of life, of time in general; that even when their garments, even when their words are a little out of fashion, there is real flesh and blood beneath the garments, real thought and feeling behind the words. It may be urged by the Devil's Advocate, and is not wholly susceptible of denial by his opponent, that, after the first four or five books, the enormous gains open to Scott first tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded of him later compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself and his knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not only very rapidly written, but written under such circumstances of bodily suffering and mental worry as would have made any work at all impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps as idle to speculate whether this work might have been better, as it is ungenerous to grumble that it ought to have been. For after all it is such a body of literature as, for complete liberation from any debts to models, fertility and abundance of invention, nobility of sentiment, variety and keenness of delight, nowhere else exists as the work of a single author in prose.

It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, at the best of his career, brought him in about £15,000 a year, a sum previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be said that in England anything of very great value was published in it before his death. In the last ten years of his life, however, imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general, and upon two in particular—the Brambletye House of Horace Smith, one of the authors of the delightful parodies called Rejected Addresses, and the first book, Sir John Chiverton, of an author who was to continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James' Richelieu, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as Sir John Chiverton; but he was rather the older man of the two, having been born in 1801, while Ainsworth's birth year was 1805. The latter, too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as the novels—Darnley, Mary of Burgundy, Henry Masterton, John Marston Hall, and dozens of others—which made his fame; while Ainsworth (Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London, Crichton, Rookwood, Old St. Paul's, etc.) was a novelist only. Both, especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with the general public; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have yet lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked very high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ainsworth: his historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the "two horsemen" who so often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and keeping the interest of those readers who read for mere excitement: he was decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and other documents scraps of decoration suitable for his purpose, he could in his better days string incidents together with a very decided knack, and, till latterly, his books rarely languished. But his writing was very poor in strictly literary merit, his style was at best bustling prose melodrama, and his characters were scarcely ever alive.

The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in "Scotch" novels—for Miss Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and Marriage was mainly written before Waverley—was John Galt, who also has some claim to priority. He was born (2nd May 1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of his best work, but passed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was a retired West India captain; and Galt's biographers do not make it very clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and varied life. He had entered the Custom-house; but went to London in 1804, and tried literature in many forms, and for the most part with very little success. While travelling in the Levant he met Byron, of whom long afterwards he published a rather absurd life; and after his return home his Ayrshire Legatees found welcome and popularity in Blackwood. This was in 1821, and after five years' busy writing Galt went to Canada in charge of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce called the Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down completely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed incessantly. But fortune was not kind to him; and he died, in a way a broken man, at Greenock on 11th April 1839.

Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of Fraser, he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a special walk—the delineation of the small humours and ways of his native town and county—in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom been equalled. The Ayrshire Legatees is in main scheme a pretty direct and not very brilliant following of Humphrey Clinker; but the letters of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which shows Galt's peculiar talent. It is shown better still in his next published work, The Annals of the Parish, which is said to have been written long before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected by the publishers because "Scotch novels could not pay." It is not exactly a novel, being literally what its title holds out—the annals of a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, a Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose description of himself and parishioners is always good, and at times charming. Sir Andrew Wylie (a fantastic book of much good fun and much good feeling), The Entail, and The Provost (the last two sometimes ranked next to the Annals), followed rapidly, and are all good in a way which has been oddly revived of late years by some of our most popular novelists. A better writer than Galt, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir ("Delta"), another Blackwood man, whose chief single performance is Mansie Wauch, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and essays, with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very agreeable mixture of serious and comic power.

Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb the attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their fortune in the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney Owenson) did, in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and other things, some "rattling Hibernian stories" quite early; John Banim (1798-1842) coincided with the two Englishmen and exceeded them in goût du terroir; and the Fairy Legends (1826) of Crofton Croker (1798-1854) are at their best simply exquisite. But the older styles continued after a fashion, or underwent slight changes, before the novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan midway between Scott and Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the century. One of the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George IV. and William IV. was Theodore Hook (1788-1841), a man of respectable connections and excellent education, who, having made himself a favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality as a diner-out and improvisatore, received a valuable appointment at the Mauritius, laid himself open by carelessness to a prosecution for malversation, and, returning to England, never entirely escaped from the effects of this, though he was extremely successful both as a novelist, and as a newspaper writer and editor, in the John Bull chiefly. Some of Hook's political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words, music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (Sayings and Doings, Gilbert Gurney, Gurney Married, Maxwell, etc.) have become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished style.

The first series of Hook's Sayings and Doings appeared in 1824, the year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth above noticed. Three years later, and five before Scott's death, appeared Falkland, the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far surpassing any of the hour in talent, and credited by some with positive genius. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later still Lord Lytton (born in 1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer of Wood Dalling and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother's side represented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He was a Cambridge man: he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse in 1825, and his first books were in poetical form. He became a Member of Parliament, being returned in the Whig interest for St. Ives before the Reform Bill passed, and in the first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and he held this seat for a decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For another decade he was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded to the Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire in 1852, and, joining Lord Derby's reconstituted party, ranked for the rest of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. In the second Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but took no part in that of 1867, and died just before the return of the Tories to power in 1873.