and the especially popular _Daisy Chain_ (1856), with not a few
others--are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction
will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing)
of reading. Some of her early tales, before these, were a little "raw":
and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of
other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been
overcropped. But she was hardly ever dull: and she always had that
quality--if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman--which
prevents a thing from being a failure. What is meant is done: though
perhaps it might have been meant higher.

The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great company of novels
is of endless interest; perhaps one of many aspects of that interest may
be touched on specially, because it connects itself with much else that
has been said. If we read, together or in near sequence, three such
books as, say, _Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis_, and _Yeast_, all of which
appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the differences, in
quality and volume of individual genius, will of course strike every one
forcibly. But some will also be struck by something else--the difference
between the first and the other two in _style_ or (as that word is
almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say _diction_. Both
Thackeray and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this. We may not
speak so well to-day, and we may have added more slang and jargon to our
speech, but there is no real difference, except in these respects,
between a speech of Pen's (when not talking book) or one of Colonel
Bracebridge's, and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a
guardsman at this hour. The excellent Mrs. Marsh had not arrived at that
point; what some people call the "stilted" forms and phrases of fifty or
almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo
is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and