and it has been abused from various quarters. But that it is one of
the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial
and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow. Of his remaining
books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others,
though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The
first referred to (the second in order of appearance), _The Water
Babies_ (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive
_fatrasie_ of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.
But _Two Tears Ago_ (1857), though containing some fine and even really
exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and
promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had
been well restrained in _Hypatia_ and _Westward Ho!_ by central and
active interests of story and character. "Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean
War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science,
and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently
concocted and "rectified." While in the much later _Hereward the Wake_
(1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of
historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of
incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure
as in _Two Tears Ago_, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct
the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a
certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the
whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather
exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this
time.

This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more
remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for
different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel
field--Charles Reade (b. 1814), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815), and Mary Ann