presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of
the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and
the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once
put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess
that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt
about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely
independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of
that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the
inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest
sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those
of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last
decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For
the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely
uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate
Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if
they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad
novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was
compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death
which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The
average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of
novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not
necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out
thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism
in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division
outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only