riginal but uncritical talent,
which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late "Ouida"
(Louise de La Ramee). All the three last writers mentioned, however,
especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel
composition ("Ouida," in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least
endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with
larger parts of life. The danger of the kind showed less in them than in
some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the
chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers. Some even of
his books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in more of
other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to
provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten. A
run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its
preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the
training and betting preliminary to them--these form the real and almost
the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy
could make them up out of a number or two of the _Field_, a sufficient
list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions. This, in
fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally: though perhaps it
does not show quite so glaringly in other cases. Yet, even here, that
note of the fiction of the whole century--its tendency to "accaparate"
and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of
mankind--shows itself notably enough.

So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set
going hosts of imitations. _Tom Brown's School Days_, for instance
(1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad. But
there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of
subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the
religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not
merely harp on one string.

A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised
by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who
have taken it as a special subject, is the "Tractarian" or High-Church
novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had
began, had no small share in popularising it. The earlier Evangelicals
had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views,
especially among the young. Mrs. Sherwood in _Li