let vice go unpunished by the magistrate, or that refuse substantial damages to injured innocence. Even Goldsmith conquers his strong romantic tendency, and hustles his Vicar back into his benefice. Frances Sheridan, the wife of Dr. Johnson's preternaturally dull friend, and the mother of the dramatist, made herself a name by her Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph, extracted from her own Journal (1761), chiefly by withholding from her heroine all compensation for the severe afflictions heaped upon her head. Charles James Fox thought the book the best novel of the age; the praise Johnson gave it has an undertone of dissatisfaction. "I know not, madam," he said to the authoress, "that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much." But the right was sparingly assumed by the novelists of the time, and such a plot as the story of Romeo and Juliet, or of the Bride of Lammermoor, where the darker shades of woe are something more than a mere setting for Christian long-suffering, was unknown to the century that delighted in Hogarth's exhibition of the fortunes of the virtuous apprentice.

The lesser writers, whose work exhibits small tincture of art, show the satirical, didactic, practical tendencies of the time in exaggerated decadent forms. Fielding in his treatment of legal abuses, Smollett in his attack on the Methodists, and his social and political satires, had given way to these tendencies, so soon to carry all before them. In weaker hands the novel became a mere handbook of etiquette, a pamphlet on some political or social abuse, an attack on a Government, a class, or a

person. The practice of anonymity was well-nigh universal; the finely fashioned vessels of art were debased and made to serve, as at a Scythian drinking-bout, for missiles or truncheons. Let the title of one novel, published in 1768, indicate the nature of many, The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet, nearly allied to most of the great men of the Three Kingdoms. By Somebody. Or a better instance could perhaps be found in the famous novel of Henry Brooke, called The Fool of Quality (1766–1770). This work, it is true, does more than buffet the noble Sapskulls of the time; it sets up, in the history of Henry, Earl of Moreland, a pattern of natural education and simple virtue. But the author has so many interests, such width of mind, so keen a desire to further a vast variety of political and social reforms, that his story is completely overlaid by moral digressions; he is so occupied in works of public benevolence that he starves his child. The definition of a gentleman, the honour due to commerce, the British constitution, the position of women, imprisonment for debt, and the statutes at large receive his careful attention in philosophic essays, often brilliant. For this reason John Wesley and, later, Charles Kingsley praised and republished the book. Its great merits would ask for recognition were it not that they are also its greatest faults, if it be considered as a novel. Artistically it is a chaos, and such unity as it has is due chiefly to the binder.

All these preoccupations, social, political, satiri cal the marks of a fashionable town literature, served to heighten the prevalent indifference to scenery, and

the neglect of wild nature as a background for man in imaginative literature. James Howell, in the seventeenth century, said he had rather go fifty miles to hear a wise man than five to see a fine city. He might have added that he would have gone further still to avoid seeing a high mountain, for he calls the Alps "uncouth huge monstrous excrescences of Nature," compared with which the Welsh mountains are mere "pimples." Dr. Johnson took up the attitude of his century when he reproved Mr. Thrale for his interest in the dispositions of wood and water, hill and valley, during a journey through France. "A blade of grass is always a blade of grass," said the sage, "whether in one country or another;

men

and women are my subjects of inquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind." The

renewed employment of wild scenery as an effect in fiction, the exhibition once more of man crawling between heaven and earth," was linked, at the time of the Romantic revival, with the movement for stripping man of his social and conventional lendings, for reducing human nature to its simplest terms, freed from all the tyrannies of custom. Woods and hills were found to furnish the most effective background for a naked man. To say that the eighteenth-century novel has its limitations is therefore true, but it would be absurd to make of these limitations grave defects. A saner, finer body of literature than the best of the fiction from Richardson to Goldsmith is not often to be met with in a nation's history. Its energy and variety are wonderful. While the couplet of Pope held poetical literature hidebound, while the "twin coursers of ethereal race that drew the car of

Dryden were urged on by poetasters until constant flogging had reduced them to a very sorry pair of jades,—— prose literature, on the other hand, showed, and showed chiefly in the novel, vitality, versatility, experiment. Addison, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Gibbon, Burke -it would be impossible in any other century to name so great a variety of distinguished prose styles. Prose was no longer a beggar for the leavings of poetry, but had imposed on poetry its subjects and its methods. And when the romantic spirit first touched prose literature, its sanity disappeared, and there followed decades of nightmare and fever. So that no English romancer proved himself a worthy peer of the novelists until Scott, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, blended once more the opposed elements of comedy and romance.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE.

THE reappearance of romantic prose fiction in England, and the inauguration of a school of romance-writers by Horace Walpole's brief tale, The Castle of Otranto (1764), suggests all those complex and difficult problems that have gathered round the discussion of the Romantic revival. A complete statement of the causes and nature of that revival is perhaps hardly to be attained, the movement will always appear in different lights to dif ferent critics, or to the critics of different countries. Modern French critics have naturally been inclined to lay most stress on the reintroduction of "lyricism," that heightening of the sentiment of self, and that substitution of the impulse of the individual for the judgment of the community, which was heralded by Rousseau. Yet these traits do not show themselves early in the English revival of romance, and when they do show themselves in prose they are largely a product of French influences. A more conspicuous feature of English, as of German, Romanticism in its earlier phases is indicated in the name which has been applied by Mr. Theodore Watts