e strained.

[10] Some fifteen years ago, in a little book on Dryden, I called Kirke
White a "miserable poetaster," and was rebuked for it by those who
perhaps knew Byron's lines and nothing more. Quite recently Mr. Gosse
was rebuked more loudly for a less severe denunciation. I determined
that I would read Kirke White again; and the above judgment is the
mildest I can possibly pronounce after the reading. A good young man
with a pathetic career; but a poetaster merely.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW FICTION

Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel writing
in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very considerable, and
the talent displayed by at least some of the practitioners of the form
distinctly great, it can hardly have been possible for any careful
observer of it, either during the last ten years of the old age or the
first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied with it on the whole, or to
think that it had reached a settled or even a promising condition. Miss
Burney (now Madame d'Arblay), whose brilliant debut with _Evelina_ was
made just before the date at which this book begins, had just after that
date produced _Cecilia_, in which partial and contemporary judges
professed to see no falling off. But though she was still living and
writing,--though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly
half over,--_Camilla_ (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful success, and
_The Wanderer_ (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after this did she
attempt the style again.

The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for the
philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt being made
to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel of Godwin,
Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in operation as
concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder of which, Monk
Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during the earlier part of
the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert Maturin improved
considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin was born in Ireland (where he
principally lived) in 1782, and died there in 1824. He took orders, but
was too eccentric for success in his profession, and his whole heart was
set on literature and the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though
very severely criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his
tragedy of _Bertram_ acted at Drury Lane with success; but his later
theatrical ventures (_Manuel_,