from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens
(and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen
themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide
of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of
its climax.

The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer
of the drama may be too complimentary--I do not think it is, except in
so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far
than either drama itself or novel--but it is certainly not an altogether
comfortable one. For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a
more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen
who discover Shakespeares and Molières as aforesaid. And there are those
who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state
of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising. The student who
is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a
pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing
of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness. But
he might admit--while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the
Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the
dryest of dry bones--that circumstances are not incompatible with
something like a decay in the novel: just as they were with a decay in
the drama. The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth century--not too well regulated; stirred at once by
the sinking force of the mediæval and the rising force of the modern
spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly
wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a
language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody,
and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried
in business--was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this