standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may
date its revival with--though it should scarcely trace that revival
to--_Esmond_, or _Westward Ho!_ or both.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the
other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a
few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would
promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as
well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by
short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat,
and Peacock.

The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very
first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity
which his _Sayings and Doings_ (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor,
perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one
respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily
written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a
fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial
representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of
horseplay and forced high jinks--his stories have all the inseparable
faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of
fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead,
and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or
respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the
critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has
been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist
in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on
Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more
important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the
hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He
stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the
miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects,
attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French
sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist
and _colporteur_. He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of
eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an
infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise
to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all)
b