R. B. Haldane (1885), John Rae (1895), and Dr. Cunningham (1904). An attempt to exhibit the contribution he made to economics in due perspective is made by Arnold Toynbee in his Industrial Revolution. According to Toynbee the development of Economic Science in England has four chief landmarks. The first is the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in which he investigates the causes of wealth and aims at the substitution of industrial freedom for a system of restriction. The production of wealth concerned him to the exclusion of the immediate welfare of man. This was spoken on the very eve of the great Industrial Revolution. A second stage is marked by the Essay on Population (1798), of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), which may be considered the product of that revolution already in full swing. Adam Smith had concentrated all his attention on a large production. Malthus directed his inquiries not to the causes of wealth, but to the causes of poverty, and found them in his theory of population-namely, that by an inexorable law of nature population tends ever to outstrip the means of subsistence. A third stage is indicated by the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), in which David Ricardo (1772-1823) seeks to ascertain the laws of the distribution of wealth. Adam Smith had shown how wealth could be produced under a system of industrial freedom; Ricardo showed how wealth is distributed under such a system, a problem which could not have occurred to any one before his time. The fourth stage is marked by John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848), in which, after pointing out the distinction between the laws of production and those of distribution, the writer goes on to try and solve the problem how wealth ought to be distributed. Since Mill's day a fifth stage has been reached in which, under the auspices of Toynbee, Marshall, Ashley, Webb, and Cunningham, the tendency has been more and more to study economics from the historical point of view.

CHAPTER XI

MINOR NOVELISTS, MAINLY ROMANTIC: FROM
"OTRANTO" TO "HAJJI BABA"

"Mrs. Radcliffe makes her readers twice children; and from the dim and shadowy veil which she draws over the objects of her fancy, forces us to believe all that is strange and next to impossible, of their mysterious agency."-HAZLITT, English Comic Writers.

Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto-The Mysteries of Ann Radcliffe " Monk" Lewis" Melmoth" Maturin-Vathek and its author-" Anastasius " Hope-J. J. Morier-“ Zeluco" Moore William Godwin-Frankenstein.

IN 1763, Horace Walpole, whose waking thoughts were mainly occupied with the Castle at Strawberry and villa Gothic generally (he was then forty-six) had a bad Gothic dream. From this inspiration, in the course of two months' writing between "tea-time" and six o'clock, he spun the preposterous mediæval nightmare to which he gave the name of The Castle of Otranto. Now the universal verdict would be Selwyn's opinion, that Otranto is too childish to make even a schoolgirl yawn, and the machinery of the colossal casque, and the armour that drops blood, and the sentimental tale intertwined with it all, simply bore the present-day reader to extinction. Yet The Castle of Otranto undoubtedly set a fashion for mediæval legend, diablerie, mystery, horror, and Gothic decoration in fiction which led directly by the route of Ann Radcliffe to the Waverley Novels, and even to Victor Hugo.

The Tales of Mystery and of Terror that came over

the spirit of the dream of English Romance between Sterne and Scott, an interval of between thirty and forty years, are now very little cared about. From The Castle of Otranto to Melmoth one thinks but little of those "horrid tales," save as having contributed to the lambent satire of Northanger Abbey. Walpole and Clara Reeve started the fashion of medieval mystery and romance, and old Godwin and his daughter kept it going well on into the nineteenth century, but the great masters and mistress of the genre were Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin.

Ann Ward was born in London on July 9th, 1764. Her parents were tradespeople, but she always claimed remote descent from the famous Dutch family of De Witt, a representative of which came over with the Vermuydens, and married into the Chelseden family. After two comparative failures, Mrs. Radcliffe brought out The Romance of the Forest in 1791. It was followed by the still more successful Mysteries of Udolpho of 1794, which was eulogised by Sheridan and Fox, and brought the authoress the then almost unprecedented sum for a novel of £500. She was even more successful with The Italian (1797), which is the best of her works from the point of view of construction of character, though it is inferior in the Radcliffean qualities of moonlight mystery and Blue Danube style of landscape. At the moment of her greatest triumph, which Scott himself always professed to admire greatly, Mrs. Radcliffe had the strength of mind to retire. She produced a single volume of Rhineland Travel in 1795, which is noticeable rather for being sensible and well written than pre-eminently picturesque, but beyond that lived a secluded life, journeying round the coast with her husband, and "devouring" the novels of other people, until her death on February 7th, 1823.

Her real gifts have been, we think, to a certain extent

misapprehended. She wrote an excellent style, rhythmic and musical in a high degree, and she was one of the first to excel in sentimental landscape, the landscape which is lighted up, like the stage in a melodrama, to suit the particular conjuncture of the hero's or heroine's affairs as the case may be; and, appropriately enough, this landscape is more often than not of a Salvator Rosa complexion. Attempt at verisimilitude there is practically none, for her landscapes are of a pearliness and verdure quite foreign to the south of Europe, in which most of her plots are laid. Yet her efforts in this direction are seldom wholly destitute of charm.

Her manipulation of mystery and horror was the visible attraction to most of her contemporary readers, no doubt. To the modern reader, it must be admitted, her dialogue and characterisation (except in The Italian, in which Schedoni undoubtedly makes a new departure), her plots and carefully calculated machinery of jangling chains, mysterious music, echoing vaults, sliding panels, and sinister bandit barons, appear almost inconceivably and childishly pinchbeck-all the sensational and blood-curdling business has been done so enormously better by writers like Wilkie Collins and in books such as Jane Eyre and Uncle Silas. To the generation which had gaped over the helmet in The Castle of Otranto, it was, of course, a sparkling novelty, and scholars such as Warton and Crabbe Robinson sat up all night over Udolpho just as in the 'eighties of the nineteenth century all Oxford (and Cambridge, too, no doubt) went mad over She. So puissant in literature is the power of novelty. The obscurity of her later years and her private mystery, whatever it was, which led her to seclude herself (as in the case of Borrow, her fame had been dead and buried for nearly a quarter of a century before she actually deceased), have had the effect of unduly diminishing her literary consideration.

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was, as a novelist, a mere creature of Mrs. Radcliffe's. The son of a wealthy official with estates in Jamaica, he was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, and then proceeded to Weimar, and subsequently to The Hague, with a view perhaps to diplomatic service. He was, however, introduced to Goethe, and he drank deep draughts of German romanticism and poetry. He began to shape romantic ballads inspired by the inevitable Bürger, and commenced a novel with supernatural machinery and spurious mediæval and legendary colouring. The novel dragged, however, as we learn from his amusing letters to his mother, until the appearance of Udolpho, which gave him just the requisite stimulus. Lewis had an immense appetite for demonology and "Gothic" patterns, but little taste, no humour, and less than no sense of historical propriety. The result is seen in the uncanny extravaganza which he gave to the world in 1795 under the title of Ambrosia, or The Monk. It gained Lewis a world-wide notoriety, and he was henceforth known in society as "Monk" Lewis. He bought a seat in Parliament, but was seldom seen there, for he was writing a transpontine drama called The Castle Spectre, the success of the season of 1797. The "brushwood splendour" of this good-natured fopling (as Lockhart calls Lewis) may have dazzled Scott for a moment in 1798. At any rate, Scott was flattered by the Monk's notice at Edinburgh, and was delighted to contribute to the Ballad Miscellany, largely composed of specimens of German Volkslieder and versions of "the German diablerie," Lewis brought out in 1799-1801 as Tales of Terror and Tales of Wonder. Byron later, during the riotous days of the Regency, liked to be seen in the company of Monk Lewis, though he professed that he bored him not a little. In 1815, however, Lewis sailed away to his Jamaica property, and died on a return journey in 1818. His narrative