in favour of the historical
novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done
great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative
literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said
about this judgment--I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of
itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in
the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again
like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first
place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the
imaginative and other literature of _any_ time does not itself "go into
the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In
the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave
question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in
England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not
been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or
other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place
there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two
thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic
has to do: and no kind which--in two thousand, or two hundred, or
twenty--has produced literature that is good or great can be even
temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without
exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful
only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and
Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others
if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a
good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the
advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to
obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex
most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.

This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the
wilderness--had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had
been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"--for more than two
thousand years before _Waverley_. Of its earlier attempts to get into
full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more
recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now
due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to
the kind by the heroi