nce of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the
question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry,
why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate
in prose romance, whom should we choose?

The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in
poetry: that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an
army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a
very high average of merit--and yet so little of the very first rank.
For the first time in the present century, English literature is
without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The
nineteenth century opened with _Castle Rackrent_ and the admirably
original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same
field. And since _Waverley_ appeared, in 1814, we have had a
succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work
is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death
Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the
Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly
together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period
they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony
Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of
those companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are
household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English
tongue is heard.

We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are
but too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a
little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his
conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances
which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative
palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most
readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be
laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind
remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be
four-fifths of the whole.

The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses
evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its
bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots
like an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus the men and women of
the first rank still hold the field in the million home