romance the appointed reviver of
prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,
sooner or later.

Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on
individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present
condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter
into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were
convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One
might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable
statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general
standard of excellence in fiction is higher _to-day_ than ever it was
before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the
Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think
I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is
the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can
you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the
impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative
completeness.

Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who
ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely
to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took
occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor
"Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel
generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom
to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had
disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the
incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise
to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number
of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the
exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.

But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on
perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already,
and which we may survey in surety now.

We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient
and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and
slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's _Early English Prose
Romances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason
was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not
to recognis