in the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensish
character-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascal
Captain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen
herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make us
angry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which is
not poetical and hardly even just.

The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be without
practitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after a
fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here.
Its most remarkable representatives perhaps--men, however, of very
different tastes and abilities--were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry
Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a
remarkable book--almost a kind to itself--_John Inglesant_ (1880), a
half historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life,
never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed tried
little. The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failing
to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, broke
through at last in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ with a series of studies of
country life, _The Gatekeeper at Home_ (1878), and afterwards turned
these into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly any
character, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere of
these same sketches. His health was weak, and he died in early middle
age, leaving a problem of a character exactly opposed to the other.
Would Mr. Shorthouse, if he had not been a well-to-do man of business,
but obliged to write for his living, have done more and better work?
Would Jefferies, if he had been more fortunate in education, occupation,
and means, and furnished with better health, have co-ordinated and
expanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" than
the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-_paysagiste_, which he has left us?