most difficult of
literary feats. But to write a poor one has often been found an easy
undertaking. The apparent facility of fictitious composition has
deceived great numbers of literary aspirants, and has filled the
circulating libraries with a vast collection of thoroughly worthless
productions. This unfortunate fecundity, to which the department of
fiction is subject, began to be conspicuous at the end of the
eighteenth century,[200] and excited much opposition to novels of all
kinds. Hannah More, in her essays on female education, inveighed
against the evil in terms which are quite as applicable at the present
day. "Who are those ever multiplying authors, that with unparalleled
fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick-succeeding
progeny? They are _novel-writers_; the easiness of whose productions is
at once the cause of their own fruitfulness, and of the almost
infinitely numerous race of imitators to whom they give birth. Such is
the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw
girl, while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write. And
as Alexander, on perusing the Iliad, found by congenial sympathy the
image of Achilles stamped on his own ardent soul, and felt himself the
hero he was studying; and as Correggio, on first beholding a picture
which exhibited the perfection of the graphic art, prophetically felt
all his own future greatness, and cried out in rapture: 'And I, too, am
a painter!' So a thorough-paced novel-reading miss, at the close of
every tissue of hackneyed adventures, feels within herself the stirring
impulse of corresponding genius, and triumphantly exclaims: 'And I,
too, am an author!' The glutted imagination soon overflows with the
redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and, by a sort of
arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels,
to produce a fourth; till every fresh production, like the prolific
progeny of Banquo, is followed by

'Another, and another, and another!'"

[Footnote 199: Afterward Madame D'Arblay.]

[Footnote 200: See the "Progress of Romance," by Clara Reeve, for the
names of many now forgotten novels, for which room cannot be spared
here.]

IV.

The writers who took the chief part in originating and sustaining the
romantic revival in English fiction were Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve,
and Mrs. Radcliffe. As we have called upon the testimony of Walpole so
often in this work, and