can read them. Others, such as _Kate Coventry_ (1856), a very lively and
agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting.
Others, such as _Holmby House_ (1860), _The Queen's Maries_ (1862),
etc., attempt the historical style. But perhaps this mixed novel of
sport, society, and a good deal of love-making reached its most curious
development in the novels of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once
famous _Guy Livingstone_ (1857) onwards--a series almost typical, which
was developed further, with touches of original but uncritical talent,
which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late "Ouida"
(Louise de La Ramée). All the three last writers mentioned, however,
especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel
composition ("Ouida," in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least
endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with
larger parts of life. The danger of the kind showed less in them than in
some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the
chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers. Some even of
his books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in more of
other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to
provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten. A
run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its
preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the
training and betting preliminary to them--these form the real and almost
the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy
could make them up out of a number or two of the _Field_, a sufficient
list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions. This, in
fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally: though perhaps it
does not show quite so glaringly in other cases. Yet, even here, that
note of the fiction of the whole century--its tendency to "accaparate"
and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of
mankind--shows itself notably enough.