as no equal. Only Dante, Beckford, and Scott in _Wandering
Willie's Tale_ have given us Hells that are worthy of the idea of Hell.

Except that both were very much of their time, it would be impossible to
imagine a more complete contrast than that which exists between Beckford
and Bage. The former was, as has been said, one of the richest men in
England, the creator of two "Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the
absolute arbiter of his time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament
while he chose to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a
daughter of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons,
the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled in
magnificence and choice. Robert Bage, who was born in 1728 and died in
1801, was in some ways a typical middle-class Englishman. He was a
papermaker, and the son of a papermaker; he was never exactly affluent
nor exactly needy; he was apparently a Quaker by education and a
freethinker by choice; and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason
or that to stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels: _Mount
Henneth_, _Barham Downs_, _The Fair Syrian_, _James Wallace_, _Man as he
is_, and _Hermsprong_. The first, second, and fourth of these were
admitted by Scott to the "Ballantyne Novels," the others, though
_Hermsprong_ is admittedly Bage's best work, were not. It is impossible
to say that there is genius in Bage; yet he is a very remarkable writer,
and there is noticeable in him that singular _fin de siecle_ tendency
which has reasserted itself a century later. An imitator of Fielding and
Smollett in general plan,--of the latter specially in the dangerous
scheme of narrative by letter,--Bage added to their methods the purpose
of advocating a looser scheme of morals and a more anarchical system of
government. In other words, Bage, though a man well advanced in years at
the date of the Revolution, exhibits for us distinctly the spirit which
brought the Revolution about. He is a companion of Godwin and of Mary
Wollstonecraft; and though it must be admitted that, as in other cases,
the presence of "impropriety" in him by no means implies the absence of
dulness, he is full of a queer sort of undeveloped and irregular
cleverness.

The most famous, though not the only novel of Richard Cumberland;
_Henry_, shows the same tendency to break loose from British decorum,
even such decorum as had really been in the main observed by the