ttle Henry and his
Bearer_ and _The Fairchild Family_ (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth"
(Browne or Tonna) are examples. But the High-Church party, in accordance
with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century,
always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher
standard of scholarship and of general literary culture. Its early
efforts in fiction--according to the curious and most interesting law
which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through
something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large--were not strictly
novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind. In the late
thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were
Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective. The
future bishop's _Agathos_ (before 1840) is a very spirited and
well-written adaptation of the "whole armour of God" theme so often
re-allegorised: and Adams's _Shadow of the Cross_ is only the best of
several good stories--of a rather more feminine type, but graceful,
sound enough in a general way, and combining the manners of Spenser and
Bunyan with no despicable skill. If, however, the Tractarian
fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no
necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious
Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined
religious instruction and pastime. But they went much further afield.
Sometimes the excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing
_Owlet of Owlstone Edge_ and _The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of
Roost_ of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness
which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the _bete noire_ of the
early Anglo-Catholics. William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly
for the young. But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that
which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was
the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands
of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very
great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior: but
undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style. In her novels
(_Gertrude, Katharine Ashton_, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss
Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of
ordinary life. Not that she esc