riods of undue expansion, the
prevalent form absorbed many talents not naturally attracted toward it.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century in England, for instance, the
drama was more profitable, and, therefore, more alluring, than any other
field of literary endeavor; and so it was that many a young fellow of
poetic temperament adventured himself in the rude theater of those
spacious days, even tho his native gift was only doubtfully dramatic. No
reader of Peele's plays and of Greene's can fail to feel that these two
gentle poets were, neither of them, born play-makers called to the stage
by irresistible vocation. Two hundred years later, after Steele and
Addison had set the pattern of the eighteenth-century essay, the drama
was comparatively neglected, and every man of letters was found striving
for the unattainable ease and charm of the 'Tatler' and the 'Spectator.'
Even the elephantine Johnson, congenitally incapable of airy nothings
and prone always to "make little fishes talk like whales," disported
ponderously in the 'Idler' and the 'Rambler.' The vogue of the essay was
fleeting also; and a century later it was followed by the vogue of the
novel,--a vogue which has already endured longer than that of the essay,
and which has not yet shown any signs of abating. Yet the history of
literature reminds us that the literary form most in favor in one
century is very likely to drop out of fashion in the next; and we are
justified in asking ourselves whether the novel is to be supreme in the
twentieth century as it was in the nineteenth, or whether its popularity
must surely wane like that of the essay.

Altho the art of fiction must be almost as old as mankind itself, the
prose novel, as we know it now, is a thing of yesterday only. It is not
yet a hundred years since it established itself and claimed equality
with the other forms of literature. Novelists there had been, no doubt,
and of the highest rank; but it was not until after 'Waverley' and its
successors swept across Europe triumphant and overwhelming that a
fiction in prose was admitted to full citizenship in the republic of
letters. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to the novel and so familiar
with its luxuriance in every modern language that we often forget its
comparative youth. Yet we know that no one of the muses of old was
assigned to the fostering of prose-fiction, a form of literary endeavor
which the elder Greeks did not foresee. If we accept Fielding'