"suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign
travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days
still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long
run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the
early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural
appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and
hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for
instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
_Charles O'Malley_ with its love-making and its fighting, its
horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its
devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a
reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over
and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of
the author's change remains not the less historically and
symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which
we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in
the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the
following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:
and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance,
sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the
highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of
these may be found in the work of the Brontës, Charlotte and Emily (the
third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of
Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were
separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and
Kingsley by but one.

[23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic