en really
exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and
promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had
been well restrained in _Hypatia_ and _Westward Ho!_ by central and
active interests of story and character. "Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean
War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science,
and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently
concocted and "rectified." While in the much later _Hereward the Wake_
(1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of
historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of
incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure
as in _Two Tears Ago_, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct
the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a
certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the
whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather
exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this
time.

This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more
remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for
different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel
field--Charles Reade (b. 1814), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815), and Mary Ann
Evans (b. 1819). It would be difficult to find three persons more
different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of
the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the
most various uses and developments. Reade--who thought himself a
dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost
ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at
Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties--came rather closer to Dickens
than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of
non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking
what seemed to him abuses--in lunatic asylums (on which point he was
very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things. But
he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his
use--it also must, one fears, be called an abuse--of a process obviously
invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a
certain point. This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of
newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into
fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had