case, if not in the former, books deserving to be read at
intervals by more than the bookworm. The exquisite _Story without an
End_, which Sarah Austin half adapted, half translated, and which, with
some unusually good translations from Fouque and others, set a whole
fashion fifty years ago, must pass with mere allusion; the abundant and
not seldom excellent fiction of the earlier High Church movement pleads
in vain for detailed treatment. For all doors must be shut or open; and
this door must now be shut.

CHAPTER VIII

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

It is the constant difficulty of the literary historian, especially if
he is working on no very great scale, that he is confronted with what
may be called "applied" literature, in which not only is the matter of
superior importance to the form, but the importance of the matter itself
disappears to a greater or less extent with time. In these cases it is
only possible for him to take notice of those writers who, whatever the
subject they handled, would have written literature, and perhaps of
those who from the unusual eminence and permanence of their position in
their own subjects have attained as it were an honorary position in
literature itself.

The literary importance and claim, however, of these applied branches
varies considerably; and there have been times when the two divisions
whose names stand at the head of this chapter even surpassed--there have
been not a few in which they equalled--any section of the purest _belles
lettres_ in strictly literary attractions. With rare exceptions this has
not been the case during the present century; poetry, fiction, history,
and essay-writing having drawn off the best hands on the one side, while
science has attracted them on the other. But the great Oxford Movement
in the second quarter created no small amount of theological or
ecclesiastical writing of unusual interest, while there had been
earlier, and continued to be till almost the time when the occupation of
the field by living writers warns us off, philosophers proper of great
excellence. Latterly (indeed till quite recently, when a certain
renaissance of philosophical writing not in jargon has taken place with
a corresponding depression of the better kind of literary theology) the
philosophers of Britain have not held a prominent place in her
literature. Whether this was because they have mostly been content to
Germanise, or because they have not been provided wi