be impossible for any competent
critic, however much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship,
not to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have been
illustrating from others, of the system of novel-production _a la
douzaine_. In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutary
conditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life may
or must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying "grist for the
mill"; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought in
all cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are too
often set to a sort of _corvee_, a day-task, a tale of bricks. It is,
one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet nothing is more certain that
bricks so made are not the best material to be wrought into any really
"star-y-pointing pyramid" that shall defy the operations of time.

A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins,
has not yet been mentioned except by glances. He was a little older than
most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens,
whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work
to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as
novelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form,
not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as
1850--the dividing year--with _Antonina_: but his three great triumphs
in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were _The
Dead Secret_ (1857), _The Woman in White_ (1860), and _No Name_ (1862).
Throughout the sixties and a little later, in _Armadale_ (1866), _The
Moonstone_ (1870), perhaps _The New Magdalen_ (1873), and even as late
as 1875 in _The Law and the Lady_, his work continued to be eagerly
read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or
so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did
not tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerable
amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died
young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain
kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever
be put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method to
Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly
with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading,
sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the o