So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set
going hosts of imitations. _Tom Brown's School Days_, for instance
(1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad. But
there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of
subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the
religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not
merely harp on one string.

A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised
by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who
have taken it as a special subject, is the "Tractarian" or High-Church
novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had
began, had no small share in popularising it. The earlier Evangelicals
had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views,
especially among the young. Mrs. Sherwood in _Little Henry and his
Bearer_ and _The Fairchild Family_ (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth"
(Browne or Tonna) are examples. But the High-Church party, in accordance
with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century,
always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher
standard of scholarship and of general literary culture. Its early
efforts in fiction--according to the curious and most interesting law
which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through
something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large--were not strictly
novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind. In the late
thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were
Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective. The
future bishop's _Agathos_ (before 1840) is a very spirited and
well-written adaptation of the "whole armour of God" theme so often
re-allegorised: and Adams's _Shadow of the Cross_ is only the best of