but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and sinking, the
flow and ebb, of poetical production and character during the time. As
no other flourishing time of any poetry has lasted so long, so none has
had the chance of developing these mutations in so extensive and
attractive a manner; in none has it been possible to feel the pulse of
poetry, so to speak, in so connected and considerable a succession of
experiment. Poetical criticism can never be scientific; but it can
seldom have had an opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process
than here, owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the
accessibility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual
secret as usual escapes; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer trail
than usual through the chambers of her flight.

Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe's
famous axiom _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_ holds good. Although there is
a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth
and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and
nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not
indiscernibility but still identity. The lower kinds of literature admit
of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the
most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of
the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.

This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry
in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it
was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth
century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of
the time, except such purely isolated things as _Vathek_, are
experiments, and all but the very best--the novels of Miss Edgeworth,
those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss
Austen, and a very few others--are experiments of singular lameness and
ill success.

With Scott's change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly,
and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came
into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters
which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering
success of _Waverley_ bred a whole generation of historical novels; how
side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered,
continued to be issued, with c