of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
adroit hands of women.

We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
type and foreru