lity to constant reading
by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be
amusement rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than
intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pass time. For these
requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new
thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful
specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly,
as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for
novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to
keep up with it.

Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The
absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing
was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the
contemporary France of that date can show such a "galaxy-gallery" as the
British novelists--Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot,
Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and
others--who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period
the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we
add to them Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of
even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said,
a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the
"fifty" period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray
and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best,
Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and
unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of
distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a
great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at
present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of
performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment,
there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had
in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly
a century ago,--whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural
style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels
of problem, and so forth,--and whether the coming age will dismiss much
of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in
other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is
not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly bette