iod even of best or nearly best production went on
with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented
by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older
writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged
and younger. To these in some degree, and to those who have finished
their career in the last thirty years to a greater, we must now turn.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION

In regard to a large part of the subject of the present chapter the
present writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week and
almost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so
happened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly with
the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the
nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of the
last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all along
its course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, be
insisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally in
literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos
and allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of an
inclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in which
isolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of the
central group, but in which the table lands are lower, the _average_
height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer and
nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens there
was no reason for any one less hopelessly pessimist than Peacock's Mr.
Toobad, or Sydney Smith's Tuxford waiter, to take a gloomy view of the
future of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in the last
chapter Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and if
Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing novels, he had, before ceasing,
given signs that he had better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of
"George Eliot," she was at her most admirable; some of the very best
stuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all but his best was
still to appear; Charles Reade was writing busily with that curious
unsatisfactory genius of his; others were well at work.

There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith had been writing
for some dozen years: and though he had achieved no general popularity,
though even critics might make reserves as to points in his proced