his time, the great example of
Scott and Miss Austen--the great wave of progress which exemplified
itself first and most eminently in these two writers--had had time to
work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The
novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second
decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which
Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore--as their
elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had
not--time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair
had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even
greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise,
the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which
Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by
thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of
former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they
also _profited_ by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the
immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from
1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They
had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for
it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country
had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of
political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion
and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
complete their education and the machinery of its development.

The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both
directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal