linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: but it is
distinctly deficient in _ease_. There are endless flourishes and
periphrases--the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced
(and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even
permitted entrance in improved and warranted varieties. You must never
say "won't" but always "will not," whereas the ability to use the two
forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue. You
say, "At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation
were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation." You
address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and
other great men, "Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc." In short, instead of
reserving the grand manner (and a rather different grand manner) for
grand occasions, you maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it
throughout. The real secret of the novel was not found out till this was
discarded. Perhaps that real secret does not lie so much anywhere else
as here.

A few words may not improperly be said about some of the circumstances
and details of novel-appearance and distribution, etc., at this palmy
day of English fiction. At what time the famous "three-decker" was
consecrated as the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been
able to determine exactly to my own satisfaction. Richardson had
extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight volumes: Miss
Burney latterly had not been content with less than five. From the
specimens I have examined, I have an idea that with the "Minerva Press"
and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century, _four_ was a very favourite if not
the most usual number. But these volumes were usually small--not much
larger than those of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one
remembers, used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case