this life in the eighteenth century having worn off, while it had not yet been much sophisticated, as it has been since by the incursion of moneyed parvenus from the manufacturing towns, and the vast extension of outlying suburbs. But he did not confine himself to it. His official experiences were utilised with some audacity and great success; and few novelists of any country have had a wider and more accurate knowledge of different classes of society.

His industry was extraordinary, his versatility unquestionable, his grasp of situation and character sometimes but a little, if even a little, below the very highest. The vividness of the personages and the quick turns of incident and interest in such books as Barchester Towers (1857) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) are astonishing and delectable; many others, out of a total of fifty or sixty, deserve almost equal praise in parts, and would have made the fortune of a minor novelist as wholes. Always,-in his early Irish books as much as in his later excursions into romance in Nina Balatka, &c.,-his skill to catch the manners as they rose, and his wonderful knack of weaving an interesting story (sometimes, as in Orley Farm (1862), out of the most commonplace materials), are things that can hardly receive too willing and liberal critical recognition. But always there is that ungrateful yet damaging "If there were only less of it all!" If what is good were more concentrated, we think (perhaps it is only a delusion) that what is not so good must have been squeezed or strained

out in the concentration; if the merits of the author, instead of being, as it were, dosed into scores of different books to give them just sufficient body and flavour, had been presented in a few specimens of real "vintage wines," how much better had it been! Very likely an unjust complaint: perhaps as such a mere delusion. But so it occurs.

In the case of Miss Yonge (1823-1901) there is an excuse for this voluminousness which does not apply in the others. Charles Reade was Miss Yonge. so self-willed a person that he would have probably done almost exactly as he did whatever the circumstances of his life. Anthony Trollope, though by no means a mere money-grubber, would probably have been content to write half the number of novels if he could have got the same money for the half as for the whole. But Miss Yonge wrote to do good; she spent a large part of her not inconsiderable earnings on actual good works; and she probably never wrote a line without a hope, most amply justified, that the prodesse as well as the delectare would result. Given, therefore, a long life, a great industry, and an unfailing flow of matter, and a huge production must necessarily have followed. She began very early (about 1848), and she wrote, in more than fifty years, more than three times as many books. Coming by time, temperament, and even place (for her abode was close to Keble's parish), under the influence of the Oxford Movement, she attempted at once that task of enforcing its principles in fiction, the example of which had been set

much earlier by the Evangelicals, but which had not in their case produced work of much literary merit. Fortunately for herself and her readers, Miss Yonge's education was excellent and her taste capital. She was no mean historical student,-even from the point of view of the serious scholar,—and her acquaintance with general literature was wide and discerning.

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Even in very early works-stories rather than novels-a fresh and vigorous handling of the domestic, a winning adaptation of the historic, matter was perceivable; and her first really important attempt, The Heir of Redclyffe (1855), had very great popularity and influence. It is a sign of the deplorable want of width of literary and historical knowledge now prevailing that surprise was expressed by more than one or two reviewers at the acknowledgment of this influence which was made in the Life of William Morris. Nothing could be truer, and nothing more natural for the Oxford Movement really contained in itself the germ of pre-Raphaelitism and many other things, which have since in some cases wandered rather far from their origin. Miss Yonge wrote almost as long as she lived: she "uttered nothing base," and it may almost be said that she never did anything bad. No doubt, after about 1870 the enormous quantity began to show some signs of slackening power, and more of that attempt, not quite successful, to "follow the period" without deserting the writer's own ideas, which is one of the great notes of these immensely productive writers in recent days. She seldom troubled herself very much about

plot, and not often much about description: but her study of character was unfailingly genial, as well as always noble and full of gentle life; and her dialogue was "a model of the middle style”—facile without being vapid, natural without being either vulgar or commonplace.1

These writers, with Mr Meredith, who lodged his diploma-piece with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in 1859, and Mr Thomas Hardy, also happily a survivor, not merely supply the most remarkable examples in different kinds of English novel-work during the last half century, but almost what may be called its palette. That is to say, almost all later novelists either follow them as models more or less directly, or blend their characteristics with such further admixture of individuality as may in each case have been found possible. At different times group

characterisations, such as the novel of muscular Christianity, the sensational novel, and others, have been attempted; but they have seldom corresponded to any real distinction of species, and have so passed 1 It would provoke the wrath of many if we left out from this straitened list of the preferred a lady older than Dickens or Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell (1810-1865), who, however, Mrs Gaskell. hardly began to write till the eve of our proper period. Mary Barton (1848), just before the beginning, has had warm admirers, and Cranford (1853), a little after that beginning, has never lacked them. Nor, indeed, have most of her books. But there were not many of them, for she died in 1865, after less than two decades of literary activity. Cranford is an attempt in that style of domestic miniature-painting which, after being sketched by Addison before the dawn of the novel proper, was brought to unsurpassable perfection by Miss Austen; and it undoubtedly holds very high rank in the class.

out of use. It is safer to mention individuals, though to none of them can much space be given. R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900), barrister, scholar, gentleman, and market-gardener, did not take to novel-writing till he was nearly forty; then after one or two minor works made a great success, in 1869, with Lorna Doone, a quasi-historical novel of the West Country, and continued writing in this and other styles to the end of the century and of his life. It is by no means certain that he does not deserve as high a place as any novelist mentioned here except Dickens and Thackeray; it is almost impossible not to think that, with the process of extraction and compression so often referred to, he must have deserved a higher place still. The variety and the vigour of scene and character - sketching in such books, not only as that just mentioned, but as Cradock Nowell (1866), The Maid of Sker (1872), Alice Lorraine (1875), Cripps the Carrier (1876), Christowell (1882), Springhaven (1887), are both extraordinary.

Mrs Oliphant (1828-1897) began to write somewhat sooner, and never did anything better than her early novel, or series of novels, The Chronicles of Carlingford (1863-76), but accomplished an immense quantity of work, sometimes pretty full and never quite empty of merit. Three prolific writers somewhat under the influence of Dickens, James Payn (1830-1898), William Black (1841-1898), and Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901), were amuseurs, as the French say, of extraordinary talent, each of whom more than once showed capacity for giving something