prose novel, as we know it now, is a thing of yesterday only. It is not
yet a hundred years since it established itself and claimed equality
with the other forms of literature. Novelists there had been, no doubt,
and of the highest rank; but it was not until after 'Waverley' and its
successors swept across Europe triumphant and overwhelming that a
fiction in prose was admitted to full citizenship in the republic of
letters. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to the novel and so familiar
with its luxuriance in every modern language that we often forget its
comparative youth. Yet we know that no one of the muses of old was
assigned to the fostering of prose-fiction, a form of literary endeavor
which the elder Greeks did not foresee. If we accept Fielding's
contention that the history of 'Tom Jones' must be considered as a
prose-epic, we are justified in the belief that the muse of the
epic-poetry is not now without fit occupation.

Indeed, the modern novel is not only the heir of the epic, it has also
despoiled the drama, the lyric and the oration of part of their
inheritance. The 'Scarlet Letter,' for example, has not a little of the
lofty largeness and of the stately movement of true tragedy; 'Paul and
Virginia,' again, abounds in a passionate self-revelation which is
essentially lyric; and many a novel-with-a-purpose, needless to name
here, displays its author's readiness to avail himself of all the
devices of the orator. In fact, the novel is now so various and so
many-sided that its hospitality is limitless. It welcomes alike the
exotic eroticism of M. Pierre Loti and the cryptic cleverness of Mr.
Henry James, the accumulated adventure of Dumas and the inexorable
veracity of Tolstoi. It has tempted many a man who had no native
endowment for it; Motley and Parkman and Froude risked themselves in
imaginative fiction, as well as in the sterner history which was their
real birthright. And so did Brougham, far more unfitted for