Both were miracles of fecundity, Mrs. Craik producing, in the shorter
life of the two, not much fewer than fifty novels; Mrs. Oliphant,
besides a great deal of work in other departments, a tale which did not
stop very far short of the hundred. The latter, moreover, gave, at a
comparatively late period of her career, evidences of being able to
start new lines--the supernatural stories of her last stages are only
inferior to the _Chronicles of Carlingford_ themselves. Yet, once more,
we look for a masterpiece in vain: in fact in Mrs. Oliphant's case we
ask, how could any human being, on such a system of production, be
expected to produce masterpieces? Scott, I think, once wrote four or
nearly four novels in a year: and the process helped to kill him. Mrs.
Oliphant did it over and over again, besides alternating the annual dose
still more frequently with twos and threes. In her case the process only
killed her novels.

Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in the
same way, together. They were all acquaintances of the present writer,
and one of them was his friend: moreover, he is quite certain that he
could not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only takes
credit to himself for not having attempted to do so. These are James
Payn, William Black, and Sir Walter Besant. Mr. Payn was an extremely
agreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which
he perhaps took pretty early--consoling himself for a total absence of
high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation of
good-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious,
half affected belief that other men's delight in their schools, their
universities, the great classics of the past, etc., was _blague_. He
never made this in the least offensive; he never made any one of his
fifty or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the subject
required it) amusing. There never was any novelist less difficult to