holds, however, that
this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from
observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.

We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
romance of elder times.

Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
toward the production of English light literature as