of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there
exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I
dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into
scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would
certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over
the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public
libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make
out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains
certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom
"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a
book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very
meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was
originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in
"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are
certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on
this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to
share that appellation with the newspaper.

Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did
not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single
example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost
at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four
Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the
others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of
that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of
individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method
practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever
followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as
Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no
one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as