el exhausts even the very
meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was
originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in
"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are
certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on
this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to
share that appellation with the newspaper.

Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did
not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single
example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost
at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four
Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the
others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of
that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of
individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method
practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever
followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as
Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no
one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as
presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of
the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and
the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once
put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess
that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt
about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely
independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of
that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the
inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest
sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those
of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last
decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For
the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely
uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate
Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if
they had the wit, by not a few perso