d
the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the
undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to
thirty-five. I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover
Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered
Molieres, week by week or day by day, count their years between these
limits. _Beati illi_ from some points of view, but from others, if they
go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!

But all this is really idle. A critic is not right or wrong because he
is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his
age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes
the present. He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like
the right things in the right way. And it is a simple historical fact,
capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the
proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations
from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens
(and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen
themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide
of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of
its climax.

The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer
of the drama may be too complimentary--I do not think it is, except in
so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far
than either drama itself or novel--but it is certainly not an altogether
comfortable one. For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a
more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen
who discover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid. And there are those
who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state
of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising. The student who
is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a
pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing
of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness. But
he might admit--while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the
Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the
dryest of dry bones--that circumstances are not incompatible with
something like a decay in the novel: just as they were with a decay in
the drama. The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and
early seventeen