s
contention that the history of 'Tom Jones' must be considered as a
prose-epic, we are justified in the belief that the muse of the
epic-poetry is not now without fit occupation.

Indeed, the modern novel is not only the heir of the epic, it has also
despoiled the drama, the lyric and the oration of part of their
inheritance. The 'Scarlet Letter,' for example, has not a little of the
lofty largeness and of the stately movement of true tragedy; 'Paul and
Virginia,' again, abounds in a passionate self-revelation which is
essentially lyric; and many a novel-with-a-purpose, needless to name
here, displays its author's readiness to avail himself of all the
devices of the orator. In fact, the novel is now so various and so
many-sided that its hospitality is limitless. It welcomes alike the
exotic eroticism of M. Pierre Loti and the cryptic cleverness of Mr.
Henry James, the accumulated adventure of Dumas and the inexorable
veracity of Tolstoi. It has tempted many a man who had no native
endowment for it; Motley and Parkman and Froude risked themselves in
imaginative fiction, as well as in the sterner history which was their
real birthright. And so did Brougham, far more unfitted for
prose-fiction than Johnson was for the graceful eighteenth-century essay
or than Peele and Greene were for the acted drama. Perhaps it is a
consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer
itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the
plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered
to be characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.

In her encroaching on the domain of the other muses, the prose-epic has
annexed far more from her comic and tragic sisters than from any of the
other six. An opportunity for a most interesting inquiry awaits the
alert scholar who shall undertake to tell the rivalry of the novel and
the play, tracing their influence on each other and making a catalog of
their mutual borrowings. Altho the record has no special significance,
it may be noted that they have never hesitated to filch plots from each
other, the playwrights appropriating the inventions of the novelists and
the novelists levying on the works of the playwrights,--Shakspere, the
dramatist, finding the action of his 'As You Like It' ready to his hand
in a tale of Lodge's, and Le Sage, the story-teller, in his 'Gil Blas'
availing himself of scenes from Spanish comedies.

Far deeper, however, th