off Baron Munchausen (1785) in the form of a shilling chap-book-in return, no doubt, for a bookseller's dole in relief of his immediate necessities. It was compiled from odds and ends of his notes and recollections, but it crackles with a dry humour of its own, not unworthy of Lucian, the first master of the genre. Imitations have abounded, both in England and abroad, especially in America, and the genuine Munchausen has been smothered by successive sequels.

Among the novel-purveyors of the period of Scott's youth must also be recorded Cumberland the dramatist, Holcroft the autobiographer, and Robert Bage (17281801), whose novels Scott seems to have read with discrimination, for he pronounces Hermsprang and Barham Downs to have been the best of them. Both Holcroft and Bage, revolutionaries in politics, were reactionary, not to say tedious, in prose narrative. Hugh Kelly, the dramatist, also appealed to the unsavoury sentiments of his time in a novel called Memoirs of a Magdalen (1767); greatly superior both in taste and style was The Simple Story (1791) of Mrs. Inchbald. Two years later came a somewhat similar tale of Charlotte Smith called The Old Manor House, which was written at Eartham, and is said to have enchanted Cowper during his stay there. Later still we have the Father and Daughter (1801) of Mrs. Amelia Opie, a story of domestic tenderness, in which the influence of Sterne is manifest. The chief of Sterne's imitators, however, was of course the lachrymose Henry Mackenzie (1745) -1831), for many years Nestor of the Northern Athens, friend of Hume, patron of Burns, and Teutonic pioneer of Sir Walter Scott. Having imitated Addison and Steele in The Mirror and Lounger, Mackenzie proceeded in his novel The Man of Feeling (1771) to imitate Sterne. Mackenzie was an essayist of some merit, and a credit to literature in Edinburgh society; but his novels do

no more than supply a loose and feeble succession of scenes, designed to awaken the tender or passionate sensibilities. In his last novel, Julia de Roubigné (1777), in which he also denounces the slave trade, he essays a tragic plot; but the prettiness he shows in painting refinements of feeling and etiquette is ill suited to the strain of a catastrophe which involves the anguish of passion. Mackenzie lived to the age of eighty-six, much respected as a patriarch of letters in the northern capital.

Another imitator of the accidental rather than the essential qualities of Sterne is Henry Brooke, of all a discursive race (that of novelists) perhaps the most discursive, even in England. An alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin, a prolific poet and tragic writer (author of Gustavus Vasa and of The Earl of Essex (1749), in which the mouth-filling line, "Who rule o'er freemen should themselves be free," elicited Johnson's parody, "Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat "), Henry Brooke (17031783) commenced in 1766 the publication of his remarkable novel, The Fool of Quality, which extended to five volumes. The book (the title of which seems to have been suggested by a line in The Dunciad) received the imprimatur of John Wesley as of unimpeachable morality, but more than a Wesley's authority is needed to procure. it a constant supply of readers. It records the education by an ideal merchant prince of an ideal noble, Henry Moreland, who is a pattern of "natural" education and simple virtue-a pattern too closely followed for a long time to allow the heroes of English novels to be regarded as other than unmitigated bores. But the story proper is overlaid by moral digressions of such interminable length that, despite the great mental qualities of the writer, the book is losing itself in the sands of oblivion. "Artistically it is a chaos, and such unity as it has is due chiefly to the binder."

There are three outstanding pieces of prose fiction which have with more or less logical intent been treated of elsewhere in this work.

Rasselas, Dr. Johnson's story of the meditations of princes and philosophers in the pursuit of the feu follet of happiness, is less a novel proper than a rhetorical excursion in imaginative ethics, based mainly, in regard to method, upon the framework of a voyage imaginaire. Goldsmith's exquisite idyll of The Vicar of Wakefield is certainly the emanation of a genius akin to that which created Sir Roger de Coverley. Goldsmith, however, was extremely little affected by his contemporaries, and so it is hard to assign him a definite position in the succession from Richardson to Jane Austen. On the other hand, the influence of The Vicar abroad, in conjunction with Rousseau or not, has been profound and far-reaching. Through Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Goldoni, it has swayed the writers of the Latin nations; while through Wieland, Hermes, Nicolai, and Sebaldus it has dominated Germany. Goldsmith's direct influence upon Herder and Goethe, and later on Jean Paul, was very great, and has not yet been accurately estimated. As wielded by Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, English romance went forth to conquer the world.

Rasselas and The Vicar of Wakefield were both written about the same time that Sterne was creating Walter Shandy and his wife, Uncle Toby, Dr. Slop, and Corporal Trim (1759-62). Fanny Burney's Evelina appeared in 1778, when there was a complete dearth of new prose fiction. of anything approaching tolerable quality. Lydia Languish may well have been ashamed of the latest productions of the circulating library-for already by 1775 the novel had created the circulating library. But for this dearth, and the mysterious youth and freshness of the fair author, we cannot believe that Evelina would have made the sensa

tion that it did. The style of portraiture is rather that of the Hook, Cockton, Mayhew, and Albert Smith order. The freshness of its impressions, however, is unmistakable. Evelina herself is a modest, intelligent, and good-hearted girl, set to shine among fops and fools, vulgarians and worldlings. The first part is undoubtedly dull, but when the love affair with Lord Orville comes to the surface, the cleverness and charm of the heroine seem to envelop us. "Burney" is in a large measure superseded and surpassed by Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell. Fanny's Diary, on the other hand, seems to have gained in attractiveness by the lapse of time. After Pepys, it is almost if not quite the most interesting diary that we have.

CHAPTER III

MEMOIRS AND LETTERS-I

"The name of Chesterfield has become a synonym for good breeding and politeness. It is associated in our minds with all that is graceful in manner and cold in heart. The image it calls up is that of a man rather below the middle height, in a court suit and blue riband, with regular features, wearing an habitual expression of gentlemanlike ease. His address is insinuating, his bow perfect, his compliments-irresistible.”— A. HAYWARD, Biographical and Critical Essays.

"I always frequented the society of my superiors. Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope condescended to admit me into their company, and though they had no titles and I was an earl, I always felt that I was obliged by their politeness, and was favoured by being allowed to converse with them."-LORD CHESTERFIELD.

Lord Chesterfield-Lord Hervey-Lady Mary Montagu-Earl of Waldegrave Bubb Dodington-The Grenville Papers.

THERE are two noble lords among the wits of the eighteenth century, and both of them have suffered rather severely (by what Emerson might have called a law of compensation) from their fellow-wits for their titles and decorations. Titles, it has been truly said, adorn mediocrity, but only embarrass superior minds. Unconsciously, moreover, they excite in the literary critic a kind of posthumous jealousy of the assumed princely revenues of their owners, and a secret resentment against the dandified assumption of superiority on the part of these latter over professional authors. With the lapse of time, however, and by slow gradations, Literature learns to forgive social advantages, and to recognise in the literary tableaux afforded to us by Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford