fact they have but to take each a corner. Nor, even when thus
divided, is the burden left wholly to them. The utmost perfection, at
least in the short story, is reached by Merimee and Gautier, little less
than such perfection by others. For suggestions of new kinds and new
treatments, if for no single performance, few periods, if any, have a
superior to Beyle.

But, once more, just as the time need not rely on any single champion of
its greatest to maintain its position, so, if all the greater names just
mentioned were struck out, it would still be able to "make good" by dint
of the number, the talent, the variety, the novelty of its second- and
third-rate representatives. Even those who may think that I have taken
Paul de Kock too seriously cannot deny--for it is a simple fact--the
vigorous impulse that he gave to the _popularity_ of the novel as a form
of the printed book, if not of literature; while I can hardly imagine
any one who takes the trouble to examine this fact refusing to admit
that it is largely due to an advance in reality of a kind--though they
may think this kind itself but a shady and sordid one. On the other
hand, I think less of Eugene Sue than at one time "men of good" used to
think; but I, in my turn, should not dream of denying his popularity, or
the advance which he too effected in procuring for the novel its share,
and a vast share, in the attention of the general reader. Jules Sandeau
and Charles de Bernard, Soulie and Feval and Achard, and not a few
others mentioned or not mentioned in the text, come up to support their
priors, while, as I have endeavoured to point out, two others still,
Charles Nodier and Gerard de Nerval, though it may seem absurd to claim
primacy for them, contribute that idiosyncrasy without which, whether it
be sufficient to establish primacy or not, nothing can ever claim to
possess that quality.

[Sidenote: The kinds--the historical novel.]

But while it is not necessary to repeat the favourable estimates already
given of individuals, it is almost superfluous to rest the claims of the
period to importance in novel history upon them. Elsewhere[336] I have
laid some emphatic and reiterated stress on the mischief which has
sometimes arisen from too exclusive critical attention to "kinds,"
classes, and the like in literature--to the oblivion or obscuring of
individual men and works of letters. But as there has been, and I hope
will be, no ignoring of individuals here, an