it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country
had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of
political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion
and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
complete their education and the machinery of its development.

The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both
directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more
taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it
had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia
Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her
desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real
influence for no short time.

This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and
relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on