ffering, but
productive of not a little very cheerful work, of Francis Edward
Smedley, a relation of the poetess mentioned in the last chapter, be
forgotten. He, born in 1818, went to Cambridge, and then became a
novelist and journalist, dying in 1864. His best work belongs to exactly
the period with which this chapter begins, the early fifties, and had
the advantage, like other novels of the time, of illustration by "Phiz."
The three chief books are _Frank Fairleigh_ (1850), _Lewis Arundel_
(1852), and _Harry Coverdale's Courtship_ (1854). With a touch of
Bulwerian romance, something of the sporting novel, and a good deal of
the adventure story, Smedley united plenty of pleasant humour and
occasionally not a little real wit.

It will have been observed that more than one of the more distinguished
novelists of this time attempted, and that at least one of them
achieved, the historical novel; nor was it at all likely that a kind so
attractive in itself, illustrated by such remarkable genius, and
discovered at last after many centuries of futile endeavour, should
immediately or entirely lose its popularity. Yet it is certain that for
about a quarter of a century, from 1845 to 1870, not merely the
historical novel, but the romance generally, did lose general practice
and general attention, while, though about the latter date at least one
novel of brilliant quality, Mr. Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_, vindicated
romance, and historical romance, it was still something of an exception.
Those who are old enough, and who paid sufficient attention to
contemporary criticism, will remember that for many years the advent of
a historical novel was greeted in reviews with a note not exactly of
contempt, but of the sort of surprise with which men greet something out
of the way and old fashioned.

This was the inevitable result of that popularity of the domestic and
usual novel which this chapter has hitherto described, and it was as
natural and as inevitable that the domestic and usual novel should in
its turn undergo the same law. Not that this, again, was summarily, much
less finally displaced; on the contrary, the enormous and
ever-increasing demand for fiction--which the establishment of public
free libraries, and the custom of printing in cheaper form for sale, has
encouraged _pari passu_ with the apparent discouragement given to it by
the fall of circulating libraries from the absolutely paramount place
which they occupied not long