e thing had been done, twenty
years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned
from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not
disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,
did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of
fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made
it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so
likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,
arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,
or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best
title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years
before.

That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time
have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater
acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural
enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from
England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European
literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful
probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least
always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they
have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the
century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the
inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly
discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various
kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no
general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,
about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been
admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to
take a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest of
literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew
nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,
even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished
work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of
genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to
suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the
justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, _ex hypothesi_
furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them)
woul