us sometimes, talent
often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this
talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the
steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such
spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we
have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly
that between the cessation of Sir Walter's best work and the perfecting
of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels
was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume
maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.

It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as
it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary
history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the
nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be
written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in
the place which each at different times held as the _popular_ form of
literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least
achieved this result by trespassing upon the provinces of all these
three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less
importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of
adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the
novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not,
no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and
saturates itself overmuch with "purpose," but it has at least an
ancestral right to do so.

There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very
directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects
fathered upon it--often with no just causation or filiation whatever--to
wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread
of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable
persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and
when the education reaches the level of the individual's containing
power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach
nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact
observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught
reading require something to read. Now the older departments of
literature do not lend themselves with any faci