e same field, who
belong to our day, and whose verse is known more widely than their
names.

We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well
known than Mrs. Browning; but so far the greatest literary
distinction gained by the women of our age and country,
notwithstanding the far wider and higher educational advantages
enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of
prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist,
whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coarseness,
have ranked him among classic English authors, referred mischievously
to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers,
whose "ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human
heart," have not, however, availed to redeem their names from
oblivion. For some of their nineteenth-century successors at least
we may expect a more enduring memory.

Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists,
whose works are poured forth every season with bewildering profusion;
but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience than
grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in
philosophy as in narrative, perhaps in seeking for the cause of this
overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the immensely
increased number of readers--a view in which the records of some
English public libraries will bear us out. We may therefore be
thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly
purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher
and better tone of public feeling which we may attribute, in part at
least, to the influence of the "pure court and serene life" of the
Sovereign.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]

[Illustration: W.M. Thackeray. _From a Drawing by Samuel Lawrence_.]

This nobler tone is not least perceptible in the eldest of the great
masters of fiction whom we can claim for our period--Dickens, who in
1837 first won by his "Pickwick Papers" that astonishing popularity
which continued widening until his death; Thackeray, who in that year
was working more obscurely, having not yet found a congenial field in
the humorous chronicle that reflects for us so much of the Victorian
age, for _Punch_ was not started till 1841, and Thackeray's first
great masterpiece of pathos and satire, "Vanity Fair," did not begin
to appear till five years later