necessary to finish his
work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it
thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done. But perhaps there is
no class of people with whom the temptation--common enough in every
class--of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters. It
is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their
sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane
man, especially when he has a whole month apparently before him? It is
pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation: and so did a
great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray.
It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing
medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever: and I am by no means
sure that some of Dickens's worst faults, especially the ostentatious
plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as _Little Dorrit_--the plot which
marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at
all--were not largely due to the system.

Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no
means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular. The
very big people kept up their prices: but everybody else was glad to get
into "popular libraries," yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as
soon as possible.

It will have been seen that the present writer puts the novel of
1845-1870 very high: he would indeed put it, in its own compartment,
almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825.
Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to
consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous: and to set it
down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth.
There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when
Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their
dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their
nonage. One does not care to dwell long on such a point: but it may just
be observed that the present writer's withers are hardly even pinched,
let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this
rather idle notion. For some of what he is praising as the best novels
were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most
before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to
be an undergraduate. Now acute observers know that what may be calle