one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in
total unconsciousness. But it _was_ the fashion: and Mackenzie, though
perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,
by "the fair" of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of
port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by "the brave."

Moore saw a good deal of continental society--he is indeed one of the
first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution--and he had
a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed
him. _Zeluco_ chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and
human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,
pronounces white uniforms "absurd" and blue "only fit for the artillery
and the blue horse." But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero
had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.
Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who
was not to be very long after. The later books are of much less
importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which
the French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimately
connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or
sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: and
is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.

He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years
younger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but half
a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and
examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked
numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later
years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued
deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.
"Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating
libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the
destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a
very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in
any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British
Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are
represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not
quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and
the beginning of the nineteent