r the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to
nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting,
neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and
unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or
sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too
much of them in _all_ the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.

Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not
always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a
rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style
of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her
work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not
kept _Northanger Abbey_ in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would
have had nearly twenty years start of _Waverley_. And it must be
remembered that _Northanger Abbey_, though it is, perhaps, chiefly
thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as
these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If
Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the _Orphan of the Black
Forest_ and _Horrid Mysteries_ (or rather if everything relating to this
were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the
admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with
the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the
triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and the Thorpes; the most
admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not
"promiscuous" or thrown out _apropos_ of things in general, but acting
as assistants and invigorators to the story.

In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any
few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been
said--more than once or twice, I fear--that hardly until Bunyan and
Defoe do we get an interesting story--something that grasps us and
carries us away with it--at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century
Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and
Miss Edgeworth later--it is simulated rather than actually brought about
by the Terror-novel--except in the eternal exception of _Vathek_--for
Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is
mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
They don't know what they ought to do: and