ten had had it. Dickens, till
_Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never
attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at
last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and
perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a
characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle
of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping
place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It
was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.
But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she
survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was
fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is
that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of
the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,
could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being
not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A
half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not
merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his
wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an
extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a
penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish
baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved
half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin
or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help
presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way
not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been
mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as
his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily
but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only
means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The
inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful
old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident
mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement
of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently,
perhaps excessively, but it