situation
and appeal.

But this side of the matter is of far less consequence than another.
This historical element of the _historia mixta_[337] was not merely
rather a nuisance and quite a superfluity as regarded the whole of the
stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that
had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical
novel proper--that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of
life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it
could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim--and I suppose no
sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it--that even
more than in the case of Richardson's influence nearly a century
earlier, help came to their Troy from a Greek city. To France as to
England, and to all the world, Scott unlocked the hoard of this
delightful variety of fictitious literature, though it was not quite at
once that she took advantage of the treasury.

But when she did, the way in which she turned over the borrowed capital
was certainly amazing, and for a long time she quite distanced the
followers of Scott himself in England. James, Ainsworth, and even Bulwer
cannot possibly challenge comparison with the author of _Notre Dame de
Paris_ as writers, or with Dumas as story-tellers; and it was not till
the second half of the century was well advanced, and when Dumas' own
best days were very nearly over, that England, with Thackeray's _Esmond_
and Kingsley's _Westward Ho!_ and Charles Reade's _The Cloister and the
Hearth_, re-formed the kind afresh into something which France has never
yet been able to rival.

In order, however, to obviate any possible charge of insular unfairness,
it may be well to note that Chateaubriand, though he had never reached
(or in all probability attempted to reach) anything of the true Scott
kind, had made a great advance in something the same direction, and had
indeed to some extent sketched a different variety of historical novel
from Scott's own; while, before Scott's death, Victor Hugo imbued the
Scott romance itself with intenser doses of passion, of the subsidiary
interests of art, etc., and of what may be in a way called "theory,"
than Scott had cared for. In fact, the Hugonic romance is a sort of
blending of Scott and Byron, with a good deal of the author's country,
and still more of himself, added. The connection again between Scott and
Dumas is simpler and less blended with other i