ns who never seem to read a bad
novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was
compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death
which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The
average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of
novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not
necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out
thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism
in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division
outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only
partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a
well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have
a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies
something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of
the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some
minor books of this period, for this very reason.

But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are
certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for
instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been
able to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold the
reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _Orley
Farm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady
novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain
the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could
hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all,
there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact,
with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a
contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to
practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of
thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation
ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own
purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably
there is none.

The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found
out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways
always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it
can be explained and analysed, indep