is for once a more philosophical and
less cowardly explanation--that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as
Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere
before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered
that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and
tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most
inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves
up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well
off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and
fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and
Catullus, the great mediaeval, the great Renaissance examples of their
own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go
right. The adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance.
Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him;
many of those existing (including most of the mediaeval instances) were
hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the
eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature
of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to
imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have
been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the
stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far
feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light
was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before
the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to
fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams
or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel
just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a
perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner
limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not
soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the
ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more
certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.

In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which
there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was
concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not
always the same incompetence of result was seen. The f