and that, if the verdict of living readers of sufficient culture were taken, or if a list were made of eminent writers, even of a thoughtful and serious cast, who have admired him, Sterne's proper place among our British humourists would seem to be much higher than that which Mr. Thackeray has assigned to him. What is objectionable in his writings is well known, and cannot be palliated. That he was a clergyman makes the offence naturally greater. "Alas, poor Yorick!" Had he been a layman, like Fielding, more might have been pardoned to him, or there might have been less requiring pardon!

Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, carry us from the middle of the reign of George II. to the close of the first decad of that of his successor. During the first ten years of the reign of George III., and while Smollett and Sterne were still alive, the literature of British prose-fiction received additions from other pens. Three works of this date deserve special notice, as differing in kind from any mentioned heretofore, and also from each other:— Johnson's Rasselas, written in 1759; Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, written in 1761, but not published till 1766; and Walpole's Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, under the guise of a translation

from an old Italian romance. Rasselas, between which and Voltaire's " Candide," there is at once an analogy and a contrast, is less a novel or tale, than a series of Johnsonian reflections, strung on a thread of fictitious narrative. "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy," it begins, "and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." And so on the story rolls, poetic and gloomy, like a bit of the Black Sea! There could not be a greater contrast between this work of the ponderous and noble Samuel, and the charming prose idyl of dear Irish Goldy. But, what need to speak of the Vicar of Wakefield, or of the genius of its author? The Castle of Otranto may more properly require a word or two. It was "an attempt," says the author, "to blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life." By way of experiment, in reviving

the more imaginative style of romance, Walpole had bethought himself of a mediæval story of an Italian castle, the human tenants of which should act naturally, but should be surrounded by supernatural circumstances and agencies leading them on to their fate. I confess that on reperusing the story the other day, I did not find my nerves affected as they were when I read it first. The mysterious knockings and voices, the pictures starting from the wainscot, the subterranean vaults, and even the great helmet with the nodding black plumes in the courtyard, had lost their horror; and Walpole seemed to me a very poor master of the Gothic business, or of poetic business of any kind. The attempt, however, is interesting as a hark-back to mediævalism, at a time when mediævalism was but little in fashion. As a virtuoso Walpole had acquired a certain artificial taste for the Gothic; and his "Gothic Story," as he called it, did something to bring to the minds of British readers, on its first publication, the recollection that there had been a time in the world, when men lived in castles, believed in the devil, and did not take snuff, or wear powdered wigs.

To make the list of the British novelists complete down to the point which we have agreed in this lecture to consider as, in literary respects, the termi

nation of the eighteenth century, I should have to go on and say something of the following writers :Charles Johnstone, the author of the Adventures of a Guinea (1760), besides other now-forgotten novels ; Henry Mackenzie of Edinburgh, whose Man of Feeling, Man of the World, and Julia de Roubigné, were published between 1770 and 1780; Miss Clara Reeve, the authoress of the Old English Baron (1777); Miss Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, whose Evelina and Cecilia, the two best of her novels, appeared in 1778 and 1782 respectively; William Beckford, the author of the Oriental Romance of Vathek (1784); Richard Cumberland, better known as a dramatist, whose first venture as a novelist was his Arundel in 1789; Robert Bage, the Quaker, four of whose novels (now little read, but deemed worthy of republication by Scott in Ballantyne's Collection of British Novelists) appeared before 1789; and Dr. John Moore, of Glasgow (the father of Sir John Moore, and the friend and biographer of Smollett), whose novel of Zeluco was published in 1786. But though all of these were writers of talent, and though some of their novels might deserve separate recognition on account of peculiarities that might be detected in them, they may all be considered so far, at least, as I am acquainted with

them as having adopted the manner of some one or other of their recent predecessors. Johnstone is represented as a kind of composition of Smollett and Le Sage, with a more coarse and bitter spirit of satire than is found in either; Mackenzie has a general resemblance to Sterne; Miss Reeve's Old English Baron was a professed imitation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto; and so with the rest. It is not till about or a little after the year 1789, that we see a new order of novelists arising; of whom we are to take account in our next lecture. Meanwhile, let us bear in mind the fact that the British novel-writing of the eighteenth century had done much not only to enrich our prose-literature and to exercise our prose-faculty at home, but also to increase our reputation and our intellectual influence abroad. Till the times of Defoe and Richardson, we had been, in the article of Novels and Romances, if not in prose literature generally, an importing rather than an exporting nation; but our novelists of the eighteenth century turned the current the other way, and since then we have exported rather than imported. During Goethe's youth, all educated persons on the Continent were reading our Richardson, our Fielding, our Smollett, our Sterne, our Goldsmith.