Scott\'s example and success naturally attracted many writers towards the novel. Byron, Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, with Polidori, Byron\'s physician, all amused themselves with writing romances in the "truly horrid" style during a period of rainy weather on the Lake of Geneva. Byron\'s first chapters of a romance of a vampire, with the opening scene, in the desert near Ephesus, are admirable and tantalizing. Completed as heaven pleased by Polidori, the story was popular on the Continent, was made the theme of more than one opera, and was dramatized by Charles Nodier. Mrs. Shelley\'s "Frankenstein," highly praised by Scott, really is very satisfactorily horrid; her later novels are forgotten.

So far, and also in the three Scottish novels of Miss Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) there was no imitation of Scott, indeed her tale "Marriage" (1818) was published four years after "Waverley". This work, with "Inheritance," and "Destiny," contained humorous studies of Scottish character—of these Miss Pratt is the best remembered.

John Galt (1779-1839) was a man of affairs and a prolific general writer, an acquaintance of Byron. The best of his books, "The Annals of the Parish," is very good indeed: the old innocent minister records the humours and sorrows of his flock from year to year, throughout the commercial "awakening of Scotland". Except for the fact that the book deals with Scottish life it is not an imitation of Sir Walter; nor is "The Provost," or "The Ayrshire Legatees," who travel south as Humphry Clinker travelled north of Tweed, and, like Humphry\'s company, narrate their adventures and record their reflections. Galt\'s best books are still[Pg 610] well worth reading; they, not Scott\'s romances, are the ancestors of the modern "Kailyard School," as it was called in its day.

Beginning with an imitation of Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth (born 1805) became a literary man very young, published for the first time in "A Christmas Box," Scott\'s "Bonny Dundee," and, as editor, advertised himself colossally (he was a strikingly handsome person), and poured out historical novels, "The Tower," "Rookwood," "Jack Sheppard," and many others. He "crammed" for the historical details, of which he was too lavish, and, aided by Cruikshank\'s designs, attained a wide popularity, which has vanished. He continued to write almost till his death in 1882.

G. P. R. James (1799-1860) is only remembered for his famous two horsemen in his opening scenes; long before his death his vogue had passed.

His contemporary, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881), for a man so active in politics, wrote a great mass of fiction, from the "Vivian Grey" of his boyhood, to more mature works in which many of the characters were easily recognized by contemporaries. The political novels, such as "Coningsby" abound in satire, "Sybil" in reflections on society; all are full of a fantasy rather Oriental, and "Lothair," in 1870, was as personal in its allusions as "Coningsby". "Ixion" and "The Infernal Marriage" are brief apologues, full of mocking mirth; everywhere there is brilliance; but substance in the way of human character and of "convincing" narrative is rare. The author was amusing himself and his world between the innings of a greater game. Thackeray\'s burlesque "Codlingsby" may survive "Coningsby".

Perhaps Thackeray\'s "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth," may also outlive its originals, the military novels of Charles Lever (1806-1872), tales of the camp, the march and the battle. Yet they lose great pleasure who neglect Major Monsoon, Micky Free, and Baby Blake, in Lever\'s "Charles O\'Malley"; the major is a jewel of a character. The early scenes at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the Galway of the old days of claret and pistols are admirable; and Lever knew many anecdotes of the Peninsular War to[Pg 611] which he does full justice. He was in his early years a most spirited narrator, full of humour, with sometimes a cloud of melancholy crossing the landscape which dwells in the memory. No man could always maintain the high spirits of "Charles O\'Malley" and "Harry Lorrequer," and Lever turned to tales of a more subdued and ordinary kind. One of them, "A Day\'s Ride: a Life\'s Romance," considerably lowered the circulation of Dickens\'s "All the Year Round". But it will be in a sad kind of world that "Charles O\'Malley" will die.

Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was (perhaps after Robert Chambers, but far more conspicuously) the most versatile man of letters of his age. He entered Parliament very early, before the passing of the Reform Bill, and already he had impressed Scott by his novel "Pelham". Sir Walter wrote to Lockhart, curious about "Pelham" and its author. Lockhart, replied curtly that "Pelham is a puppy," and its author, like Disraeli, certainly aimed at being a dandy, and had a Byronic pose. Perhaps for this reason Thackeray regarded Lytton as a mass of affectations in thought and style, with his pretensions to classical learning and Neo-Platonic lore, and mysticism, and his affection for virtuous criminals as in "Eugene Aram". Thackeray\'s burlesque of Lytton, "George de Barnwell," was his favourite among his own works, and is a joy for ever with its sham history, sham classics, and sham sentiment. When Lytton, in a satire, attacked Tennyson as "Miss Alfred" the poet finished the fight in a single round. However, Lytton\'s novels continued to win admiration, whether they were historical romances (of these "The Last Days of Pompeii" is probably the best of all tales which introduce early Christians, and is still very readable) or whether they were stories of modern life. "Zanoni" has several times defeated the present writer; but "The Caxtons" is full of interest. There is no better romance of the supernormal than "A Strange Story"; and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, "The Haunted and the Haunters," is at least as good. The marvels, we may say, are "spread too thick," but Lytton manifestly had in his mind the well-authenticated story of Willington Mill. To the last Lytton kept changing his manner and working, with wonderful freshness, in new fields. He missed[Pg 612] being in the first rank of novelists, and the bloom is very early off the rye of novelists who fall short of that rank.

Of Lockhart\'s novels, though he tried his hand four times (once in the unlucky early Christian period with "Valerius"), only one is read, "Adam Blair," a vigorous and gloomy study of the temptation and fall of a Scottish parish minister. Hogg\'s "Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a most astonishing work, when once it gets under way, anticipating R. L. Stevenson\'s handling o the terrible in a lonely upland parish (see "Thrawn Janet"). But if the story is tardy in its earlier chapters, in the later, it rivals not only Stevenson but Hawthorne, yet few people can be induced to give it a trial.

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) is a novelist of the days of Nelson\'s fleet, and nothing is more surprising, nothing in the same field more distressing, than the neglect into which the nautical novels of the creator of "Peter Simple," "Mr. Midshipman Easy," "Masterman Ready" and "Snarley-yow" appear to have fallen. They are full of humour, high spirits, genuine adventures, and sound honest views of life and duty. Carlyle ungratefully called them "nonsense," but he read them when under the blow of the destruction of his manuscript of the French Revolution. They are the best sort of boys\' books, but the inexplicable taste of boys leads them to prefer the works of Mr. Henty to those which their grandfathers read, the books of Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens, and Captain Marryat.

They were not so fond of Michael Scott\'s "Tom Cringle\'s Log," and "The Cruise of the Midge," but they did read and shudder over Mrs. Shelley\'s best novel, "Frankenstein". Of infinitely more merit than these novelists are the glories of the Victorian period, Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Bront?.

Dickens.

"A star danced and under that was he born" might have been the astrological explanation of the genius of Charles Dickens (born at Portsmouth, 1812). Explorers of "heredity" can find no source of the humour and art of Dickens in his father (Mr. Micawber), a dockyard clerk whose fortunes were never so high as[Pg 613] his buoyant hopes; and who was in prisons often for debt. As Mrs. Dickens, the mother, confessedly lent traits to Mrs. Nickleby, we need not look for genius on that side. Dickens\'s early literary education was mainly derived from some old books which he found in a cupboard. There were "The Arabian Nights," for example, and Fielding\'s novels (he played at being Tom Jones, a child\'s Tom Jones, an innocent creature), stories of shipwrecks (he went about in fear of savages and determined to sell his life dearly), in fact there was plenty of good reading. He seems also to have had a nurse who told stories delightfully "frightening". We see many traits of his fantastic childish thoughts and dreams in the early Pip of "Great Expectations"; there are memories, too, in Little Dombey, and in the infancy of David Copperfield. He was, in short, born with an elfish imagination; always he retained the primitive habit of giving souls and characters to lifeless things. His power of minute observation was precocious, and he was a dreamer of day-dreams till the poverty, and negligence, of his family sent him to win his tiny wages and choose his own poor meals, in the service of a warehouse.

All this bitter part of his life made him a close observer of poverty; a schemer of expedients; a little man of a child. The improvement of his family\'s affairs gave him some rather irregular schooling; it was enough to teach him to draw inimitably well the various kinds of schoolboy, except the cruel bully, whom he would have found rampant and abominable at any public school. Like David Copperfield he learned shorthand, was a reporter in Parliament, and conceived a contempt for Parliamentary institutions. We all know how he felt when his first magazine article was published: in 1836 papers of his appeared as "Sketches by Boz," and in them his peculiar humour, not without debt to Theodore Hook and other well forgotten comic contemporaries, is already conspicuous.

In 1836 he was asked to write papers of the comic and sporting sort, for illustrations of the adventures of a club of citizens. "I thought of Mr. Pickwick," he says, and, though Mr. Pickwick did not often run, he ran away with Dickens\'s fancy as Dugald Dalgetty ran away with Scott\'s. The peripatetic Socrates[Pg 614] of his younger companions, Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, find Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick kept on improving as vir pietate gravis, chivalrous as Don Quixote, adventurous as he, benevolent, and innocent as a child, yet dignified, and to be trifled with by no man or cabman. We remember Mr. Pickwick\'s idea of an attitude of self-defence! The influence of Smollett is on Dickens as on Fanny Burney; "Pickwick" is a sequel of adventures of the road and of the inn, filled full of the highest animal-spirits, witness the adventure of The Lady with Yellow Curl-papers! Some extraneous stories are placed in the middle of the tale, as by Fielding and Smollett: the book is not a novel, it is something better, it is "Pickwick"!

Already, like Fielding, and with more pertinacity, Dickens was attacking social abuses, imprisonment for debt, the Fleet Prison, the Law, as represented by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg and Mr. Justice Stareleigh. Accidental happy thoughts occurred to him, Mr. Samuel Weller for one, as the tale went on appearing in monthly numbers, and the author was never much ahead of the printer. This mode of publication is responsible for the length and diffuseness of many of the novels both of Dickens and Thackeray. The sheets had to be filled: compression and construction could not be attained; and, in later works, when Dickens did labour hard to construct a plot, we find it, often, as involuted and obscure as the plots of Congreve\'s comedies.

"Pickwick" was an overwhelming success; Dickens found himself famous and entangled in engagements to produce more concurrent fictions than even Scott could have kept up simultaneously. Yet his high animal spirits and glowing fancy poured themselves out in "Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Martin Chuzzlewit" (the American scenes are due to his experiences of the United States), between 1838 and 1843. Consider the immense variety, the humour, the crowd of eternally amusing characters; caricatures, if any one pleases, but the most laughable of caricatures. The Squeerses, the Crummleses, the Dodger, Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Pecksniff, Bailey junior, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Richard Swiveller, the Marchioness—he who loves them not knows them not![Pg 615] The melodramatic and pathetic characters and scenes are less universally admired; Ralph Nickleby, Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit rather try our belief, and all the world does not weep over Little Nell. To say, with R. L. Stevenson, that Dickens, in delineating Little Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and Dora in "David Copperfield," "wallowed naked in the pathetic," is to offend many devout admirers. We can take Chaucer\'s counsel and "turn the other page".

In "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), with the charm of the infancy of David, the pain of his days in the warehouse, with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Spenlow and Jorkins, Peggotty, Mr. Dick, Betsy Trotwood, and the rest, Dickens reached, perhaps, the highest mark of his genius. In "Bleak House" (1852-1853), despite the Jellybys, and Harold Skimpole, he was too much engaged in the work of reform, and trysted with too difficult a plot, to reach similar success. The plot of "Little Dorrit" (1855-1857) is not readily intelligible; the book was disappointing. In "A Tale of Two Cities" he won the votes of very many readers who do not care for his lighter works: In "Great Expectations" he was himself again, and the plot is the best that he ever constructed, his Pip, from childhood onwards, is a masterpiece; Mr. Wopsle, and Mr. Pumblechook are joys for ever; and Miss Havisham, though severely criticized, is not, perhaps, untrue to nature, or at least to the actual facts of the case on which Dickens worked.

Of "Our Mutual Friend," it must be confessed that the plot is difficult: in "Dombey and Son" (1846-1848) Dickens appears to have deserted his idea, on an important point, as Scott did in "St. Ronan\'s Well," in deference to the wishes of a friend, and the same change seems to have been made, for a similar reason, in the fortunes of Estella, in "Great Expectations".

In "Edwin Drood," written in the last year of Dickens\'s life, (1869-1870), when he was outworn by the feverish energy of his nature, and by the fatigues of travel and of giving readings in hospitable America, Dickens at least left an unsolved puzzle to his students. What was "the Mystery" of Edwin Drood? Did Jasper murder him, or fail to murder him? Some external and some internal evidence favours the idea that Jasper succeeded, but[Pg 616] we have seen that Dickens was very capable of relenting at the last moment. In this novel, as in some of his short stories, Dickens shows that leaning to the "supernormal" which he usually kept well in hand; so much, indeed, that in his "Child\'s History of England," he treats Jeanne d\'Arc as a conceited, hysterical little prig. Dickens had none of the qualities of a historian, and all the contempt of a Liberal of his day for the Middle Ages. He was not a man of much bookish knowledge: he was a unique genius presenting, as in a magic mirror, worlds that appeared to himself alone, but that all were rejoiced to see as he saw them.

He did not see the world of "Society" as others see it who live in it (he avoided it), but then what world did he see as other people do? Other worlds he beheld with more sympathy, indeed, but all things presented a kind of fantastic vividness in that enchanted crystal of his imagination. That some of his mannerisms are vexatious is not to be denied: that there are moments of want of balance, of excitement born of fatigue, of breaking into unconscious blank verse, in the great mass of his work is too manifest in his letters we see the causes and occasions of these defects. But it is ill work, in so brief a sketch, to find faults in the productions of a genius so unique that it has, in our literature, no parallel, and can never be an example. Dickens had imitators, but he could not found a school: he was "the only Boz". His defects were perfectly visible to the critics of his own day, who did not spare them, but the world did not suffer its pleasure to be darkened by the spots on the sun. We flatter ourselves that Dickens is peculiarly English, and so he is in his idealization of punch and other creature comforts; yet he is remarkably popular, even in translations, among the French, and by the Poles he is, among our authors, the most admired.

Thackeray.

It has been the lot of Thackeray to be constantly pitted against Dickens, like Gray against Collins, and Browning against Tennyson. People have taken sides for one or another, as taste and fancy led, for they were contemporaries, they were novelists, humorists, satirists. But while Dickens, like the minstrel of[Pg 617] Odysseus, was "self-taught," and was never a man of books, Thackeray (born at Calcutta in 1811) was educated at Charterhouse, and, with Tennyson, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his career was not unlike that of his Arthur Pendennis, though he took no degree. To Thackeray, Charterhouse was what Christ\'s Hospital was to Lamb, a constant rather rueful memory; a memory, in Thackeray\'s case, of fagging, fights (in one he received an honourable scar), of idleness, story-telling, rhyming, caricaturing, and of the classics, stupidly taught. But, like Fielding, he did not forget his classics. His bent was to the art of design: many of his sketches, though often out of drawing, are very humorous; his Becky Sharp, carrying a coal scuttle, is the actual Becky, and Emmy, in the dance at Pumpernickel, wears the charming face that haunted his pencil. On leaving Cambridge he visited Germany and met Goethe: he lost his patrimony, partly to Mr. Deuceace, partly in the attempt to found a newspaper. In Paris, and in London, after an early marriage (1836), broken by a lifelong sorrow (Mrs. Thackeray survived him), he wrote for the press, continuing the vein of his scribbling in undergraduate papers like "The Snob," and of his comic prize poem, "Timbuctoo," with its dominant note "Africa for the Africans".

I see her sons the hill of glory mount
And sell their sugars on their own account.

His Parisian miscellanies in "The Paris Sketchbook" (1840) are of varied quality, but are all characteristic. He had found his style, with its harmonies, as in the essay on George Sand: and his British scorn of some French vagaries is offensive to many cosmopolitan minds. Unlike Dickens he is unpopular in France; he trod the soil with an air of remembering Agincourt and Waterloo. He wrote for "The Times," and in "Fraser," published the "Yellowplush Papers" of that great menial whose Christian names, Charles James, reveal the Stuart "mistry" in which his "ma" wrapped up his "buth". Jeames was a critic, much too personal, of Bulwer Lytton and Dionysius Lardner, that encyclop?dist; and, as a momentary capitalist, as de la Pluche, is a satirist of the age of rapid railway-made fortunes. The simple humours[Pg 618] of his spelling recall Smollett\'s Winifred Jenkins in "Humphry Clinker"; while Thackeray\'s Major Gahagan is a delightful Irish Captain Bobadil. "Catherine" was a burlesque on the heroes and heroines of novels of virtuous criminals, showing that knowledge of the eighteenth century which was Thackeray\'s favourite period ("Barry Lyndon," "Esmond," "The English Humorists," "Denis Duval," "The Four Georges").

Thackeray was much inclined to historical studies. "I like History, it is so gentlemanly," he said, but a man, not being a professor, cannot live by history alone, and he never finished, probably never began, his contemplated "Reign of Queen Anne".

Everywhere among his early essays and burlesques, his tenderness peeps out, his pathos, his love of children, and of goodness; and his haunting melancholy. These are especially conspicuous in "The Shabby Genteel Story," written at a time of great sorrow and struggle with poverty. "Barry Lyndon" was overlooked, despite its masterly ironic study of the vain-glorious Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century; its pictures, from the gambler\'s point of view, of Berlin under Frederick the Great, of the little German duchies, of the wild half-ruined Irish gentry; of the Chevalier de Balibari, so perfect as a Catholic, a disillusioned Jacobite, a gentleman, and a swindler. The later adventures of Barry are drawn from Robertson, and the Dowager Lady Strathmore, and their squalid romance. This book, among Thackeray\'s, corresponds to Fielding\'s "Jonathan Wild," though the irony is broken by the author\'s comments, which are deemed inartistic. There are moments when Barry\'s blackguardism breaks down, and he yields to what some may call sentiment, and others, the soul of good in things evil. Nothing so great and nothing more unlike Dickens, had appeared since Fielding\'s day, but "Barry Lyndon" passed without a welcome.

"The Irish Sketchbook" (1843) was the best Irish sketchbook since that of Giraldus Cambrensis, but neither that, nor "From Cornhill to Cairo" (1846) "caught this great stupid public by the ears". "Mrs. Perkins\'s Ball" (1847), a Christmas trifle, contains the immortal figure of The Mulligan, to think of whom is to laugh as one writes. He was sketched from a well-known Irishman of[Pg 619] the day. The little vignettes of other guests of Mrs. Perkins are worthy of Addison, down to the greengrocer butler.

In "Punch," Thackeray had been writing and drawing things good and things commonplace. His burlesques of novelists include "George de Barnwell" (Lytton) which he is said to have thought his masterpiece, and "Codlingsby" (Disraeli), which is hardly inferior; but Lever was annoyed by his "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth". Thackeray is the classic parodist; his gift of imitation is as wonderful in the "Burlesques" as in "Esmond". Scott, who was privately on the side of Rebecca, in "Ivanhoe," and who had deliberately made Rowena "very English," would not have been vexed, like Lever, by Thackeray\'s "Rowena and Rebecca," wherein, on false news of Wilfrid\'s death, the English princess espouses Athelstane.

It was "The Book of Snobs," with its cruel satire of our British vice, that came home, when republished from "Punch," to men\'s bosoms. Thackeray avowed that de me fabula, that he was a snob himself: and, to some readers, it is matter for regret that he dwelt so long and so intensely on the mean admiration of things mean. He told Motley (1858) that he could not read "The Book of Snobs".

At last, in "Vanity Fair," which appeared, like Dickens\'s novels, in monthly parts (with yellow covers), Thackeray, after so many vain endeavours, "took this great stupid public by the ears". Here was another epic, like "Tom Jones," of English life, from the year preceding Waterloo: though the Marquis of Steyne was too closely studied from a contemporary wicked Marquis. From the first chapter, the scene of Becky with the Dictionary, to the end where (quite out of character, say Becky\'s admirers) she appears as a melodramatic Clyt?mnestra, the author "never stoops his wing". Never, surely, did man create, in a single novel, characters so many, so varied, so justly conceived, so immortal. Fielding has not a quarter of Thackeray\'s variousness, does not see so wide a vision of life. Think of them; all the Crawleys, the two Sir Pitts, Rawdon (amo Rawdon), Jim Crawley; Miss Crawley, the old patrician Whig and sceptic; the two Osbornes, the little boys, Osborne III. and little Rawdon; Mrs.[Pg 620] O\'Dowd; the spunging-house keeper; Mr. Wenham, Ensign Stubble, Lord Steyne, the Misses Pinkerton, Briggs, Waterloo Sedley, the Belgian courier, Glorvina, the Lady Bareacres,—the catalogue is endless. Dobbin is as good as that honest gentleman can be made: we can only say that Thackeray\'s good women are not at once as human and as angelic as Fielding\'s Sophia and Amelia. Emmy is not clever; Emmy can be jealous; a vice from which Mrs. Rawdon Crawley is nobly free. The nearest woman to Sophia in Thackeray is Theo in "The Virginians". But Sophia is a paragon.

Thackeray was now, by no fault of his, set up as the rival of Dickens, whose works he constantly praised, in season and out of season, in public and in private. But as every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, a Whig or a Tory, so men are born to take one side or other about the Great Twin Brethren of English fiction, in place of admiring and enjoying both. Each has his masterpieces, Dickens with "Pickwick," "David Copperfield," and "Great Expectations"; Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," "Esmond," "The Newcomes," and "Pendennis". That admirable but lengthy picture of the life of school, of the University, literature, and Society, and of Mr. Henry Foker, bears traces, in discrepancies and fatigue, of a severe illness which affected the author\'s memory of part of the tale, as a malady swept from Scott\'s the whole of "The Bride of Lammermoor".

The noble tour de force of "Esmond" (1852) was, for the most part, dictated in disturbing conditions, which makes yet greater the marvel of its style of Queen Anne\'s date; not uniform, to be sure, not all antique (any more than Colonel Esmond\'s political views are all antique or uniform), but still, a kind of prodigy. Beatrix Esmond is indeed, as her lover said, a "paragon," and it is historically impossible that, in the end, she should have betrayed "the blameless king," King James III., whom Thackeray converted from a melancholy Quietist into a witty and profligate prince. There was no "Queen Oglethorpe". Scott never took this kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction; and Thackeray rivalled Scott\'s other licences by making the Duke of Hamilton an unmarried man. But nobody thinks of these things[Pg 621] when "Esmond" admits him into the society of the Augustan age, and when Bolingbroke hiccups about Jonathan\'s readiness to command the fleet.

"The Newcomes" (1855) revived the public taste for Thackeray; the public did not, it is said, quite understand "Esmond". Like all novels published in parts throughout two years, "The Newcomes" is too long, and has its languors, but every one wept over the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, delighted in Fred Bayham, wished "to beat Barnes Newcome on the nose," was afraid of Lady Kew; sighed with Clive, was more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of Laura Pendennis: an angel perhaps, but a recording angel.

At Rome, in winter, 1853, Thackeray, to amuse some children, wrote "The Rose and the Ring," a classic of the nursery, of the schoolroom, and of the "grown up". He who writes was a child in 1855, and to him Bulbo, Hedzoff, King Valoroso, and the Countess Gruffanuff, with the usual contrasted heroines, Angelica and Rosalba, were not dearer then than they are now. Even then the equation was plain:—

          {Angelica            Rosalba}
Fair and  {Becky               Emmy   } Dark and
false     {Blanche Amory       Laura  } true and
          {Rowena              Rebecca} tender.

Thackeray\'s naughty women are "fair and false," his good women are "dark, and true, and tender".

The novelist\'s is a "dreadful trade". He has to raise ever new crops from soil more or less exhausted. Dickens had his "Dombey," his "Little Dorrit," his "Mutual Friend"; and Thackeray had his "Virginians," the grandsons of Colonel Esmond, with their kinswoman, Beatrix Esmond, fallen into an old age of cards, and rouge and powder. Beatrix, for her beauty\'s sake, should have been translated, like the fairest woman of the ancient world, Helen, to the plain Elysian. We do not want to see her in old age, or to hear her last wild words, "Mesdames, Je suis la ——" La Reine, the Queen.

"The Virginians" is full of excellent things, wonderful studies[Pg 622] of the later eighteenth century; and Harry is a deal, brave, stupid lad, and George is a sardonic, melancholy descendant of Colonel Esmond, and ancestor of "Stunner Warrington" in Pendennis; and Will Esmond and Chaplain Sampson are worthy of Fielding, but the author was tired; after "Vanity Fair" he was always tired, and the book has barren expanses and languors. "\'The Virginians,\'" he said to Motley, "is devilish stupid, but at the same time most admirable." Thackeray\'s health was worn out; as a change of work he founded, but soon wearied of editing, "The Cornhill Magazine"; was at his lowest level in "Lovel the Widower"; was so weary in "Philip" that he styled the hero "Clive" by inadvertence, though he endowed his clumsy Philip with one of his best women, Charlotte. He ventured into melodrama, which he liked, but could not write well; yet his "Roundabout Papers" show that he was, as an essayist, equal to his younger self.

His "Denis Duval" seemed to promise a return of his genius, but Christmas Day, 1863, was a black Christmas, for the author had died, suddenly and alone, in the night of Christmas Eve.

He had a great faculty of enjoyment, a generous heart sorely tried, a melancholy that was not causeless: immense kindness and love of the young, in short the character, in these respects, of Molière and of Charles Lamb. Let us confess that he was unjust to Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond. But he had a Shakespearean tenderness for his rogues, and having conceived the draconic design of hanging Colonel Altamont, he respited that bold adventurer. From boyhood he had his own originality of style.

In the cultivated town of Highbury
My father kept a circulating library,

are boyish lines of his, and we recognize him even there, beginning to be what he is in his "Book of Ballads," so various, so merry, so melancholy, so fresh as they are. Though the influences of the prose of Queen Anne and of Fielding helped to form his style, it is entirely his own; with the blended accents of his own humour and pathos, and harmonies before unheard; exquisite passages of verbal music.

[Pg 623]

The Bront? Sisters.

Concerning the Bront? sisters much, mainly personal, has been written, in proportion to the amount of their works. Their novels, especially those of Charlotte ("Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette," "The Professor"), seem like the extraordinary and almost automatic products of their parentage and surroundings. The father, the Rev. Patrick Prunty or Bront?, was an Irish Protestant of County Down, who, after struggles with circumstances, was educated at St. John\'s College, Cambridge, and took holy orders. His Protestantism and politics were those of an Orangeman: his hero (who could have a better?) was the Duke of Wellington, and he was addicted to the composition of verse. His wife, a Cornish woman, was of feeble health, and died after giving birth to six children, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died in early youth; the others were Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818), and Anne (1820). On the mother\'s death the father lived a sequestered studious life in a bleak parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, and the children were entirely devoted to drawing, reading books and magazines meant for their elders, to writing, day-dreaming, and to wandering from the grim rectory over the open moors. Their health was blighted by the conditions of the school called Lowood in "Jane Eyre"; their tempers were hardened and sharpened by poverty and the white slave\'s life of the governess, so much dreaded and so well understood by Miss Austen\'s Jane Fairfax in "Emma". The unhappy Branwell, in the end, haunted the rectory, an awful presence of intellect degraded, and while Emily wrapped herself up in a kind of Christian stoicism, Charlotte was left to the contrast between the dreams of her fiery genius, and the facts of her narrow life. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily became inmates of the school of Monsieur and Madame Heger at Brussels, which later afforded to Charlotte the scene and two characters in "Villette". In 1846 the three sisters published "Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell". Of this book two copies were sold, of the poems Emily\'s alone are still admired for their sombre energy and resolute spirit.

The sisters now wrote novels, Emily, "Wuthering Heights,"[Pg 624] Charlotte, "The Professor"; Anne, "Agnes Grey". In August, 1846, Charlotte began "Jane Eyre," which, when finished, came into the hands of Thackeray\'s publishers, Messrs. Smith & Elder, and filled them with amazement and enthusiasm. The book appeared in autumn, 1847, pleased Lockhart, then editor of "The Quarterly Review," no less than it pleased Mr. Smith, and at once became the "daughter of debate," discussed everywhere, praised and reviled, and, in some unintelligible way, most reviled by "The Quarterly". The critic detected in the author an unregenerate, violent rebel against society, and a woman who was a dishonour to her sex! Certainly—

A wounded human spirit turns
Here on its bed of pain.

The unparalleled vigour and genius of the early scenes, the cruelties which the lonely child supports with unconquered spirit, were things new in fiction, while the repressed passion of the plain yet seductive governess during the wooing of the too Byronic Mr. Rochester, and in a house as terrible as the castle of Mrs. Radcliffe\'s "Sicilian Romance," excited a lively romantic interest, accompanied by a tendency to smile at an ignorant imagination. Borrowed romance combined with instinctive realism, bitter experience blended with the day-dreams of a life, a frankness long forgotten by early Victorian fiction, made the novel a strange and triumphantly successful combination. That mentor of young novelists, George Lewes, recommended to the author the study of Miss Austen, whose novels Charlotte Bront? was not happy enough (because she never had been happy) to appreciate. That she had no humour we cannot say, but she had none of the kindly humour of her great predecessor.

Meanwhile "Wuthering Heights," that strange and strenuous study of violent characters, was eclipsed by "Jane Eyre," though it has now come to its own, thanks to the appreciations of Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne. The author did not live to find herself famous; Anne Bront? also died, leaving their sister in deeper solitude. Charlotte\'s "Shirley" (1849), with its caricatures of the local curates, caused the discovery of her authorship: the curates were forgiving, and the novel was welcomed.[Pg 625] Miss Bront? visited London, a shy and tameless lioness, and met Thackeray, whom she had regarded as a Saul among the prophets, and discovered to be something rather different. Her shyness permitted her to rebuke him in good set terms, but blighted his guests. Her last novel, "Villette" (1852), with romantic situations, is a record of her personal experiences at Brussels; unfortunate for her hosts, and a cause of much gossip and personal discussion. The book is not destitute of the hungry bitterness which Matthew Arnold detected and disliked; and we ask how in the nature of things it could be otherwise? Her experience had been narrow, atrocious, and on her experience and from her experience she always drew when she did not borrow from her day-dreams. In life she did not find the love of which she dreamed: in 1854 (she had rejected several other suitors) she married the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, her father\'s curate, and died in the following year. Her life, her character, and her books were one, and were unique. "This little Jeanne d\'Arc," as Thackeray called her, this eager rebel and ardent Tory, broke into the placidity of the contemporary novel, and opened a pathway unto many, who had little or none of her genius.

The best estimate of the Bront?s, clear of and contemptuous of trivialities and gossip, is in French, "Les S?urs Bront?," by the Abbé Dimnet.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The end of all that Greeks and Trojans suffered for Helen\'s sake was "that there might be a song in the ears of men of after times". In the view of the interests of art (and in no other) the end of Puritanism in New England was to inspire the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). He was more certainly the classical author of American fiction than either Thackeray or Dickens is in England. They were prodigal of their genius, giving "as rich men give who care not for their gifts," or, if you please, as poor men when the printer\'s devil is at the door, even as did Sir Walter, who never thought about "art". But Hawthorne hoarded his inspirations, and when he used them gave them in the best form which was wi............