more of the life and character of that part of Scotland where the Norse or Scandinavian borders on the Celtic. In one of his novels also, Galt carries his Scotchman across the Atlantic, and so exhibits Scotticism at work amid conditions in which Scott had never placed it. Finally, from Lockhart and Wilson, as men of extra-Scottish scholarship and culture, though they also selected native themes for their fictions, and grew up in close relations to Scott, we have illustrations of Scottish life and manners, conceived in a different literary spirit, and presenting different characteristics. In Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, and in his other Scottish stories, we have, unless my impression of them deceives me, a spirit of lyrical pathos, and of poetical Arcadianism, which tinges, without obscuring, the real Scottish colour, and reminds us of the Lake poet and disciple of Wordsworth, as well as of the follower of Scott; while in his Noctes Ambrosianæ, he burst away in a riot of Scotticism on which Scott had never ventured-a Scotticism not only real and humorous, but daringly imaginative and poetic, to the verge of Lakism and beyond-displaying withal an originality of manner natural to a new cast of genius, and a command of resources in the Scottish idiom and dialect unfathomed even by Scott. Wilson's "Ettrick Shep

herd" is one of the most extraordinary creations of recent prose fiction. But it is not only novelists of Scottish birth that have occupied themselves, since Scott, in delineating Scottish nature and Scottish humours and characters. As Wordsworth purposely made the hero of his "Excursion" a Scottish pedlar, so, from the time of Scott to the present day, not a few English novelists have paid Scotland the compliment of treating it as an ideal land of rugged sublimity, both physical and moral, nearer to primeval nature, and less civilized and sophisticated than other parts of the British dominions, and have either laid their scenes there, or have fetched thence occasional characters, with all their Doric about them, to demean themselves among the Southerns in a way very different from that of such older literary representatives of the Scot as MacSarcasm and MacSycophant. For an example I may refer to Mr. Kingsley's Sandy Mackaye in Alton Lockethe cynical old Scotchman who keeps a book-stall in London, beats fallacies out of the young tailor by his talk, and rectifies, to a considerable extent, whatever is wrong in his neighbourhood.

Besides the Scottish Novel, however, or the novel with Scottish character and circumstance in it, there has been (2) THE NOVEL OF IRISH LIFE AND MAN

NERS. This had been initiated, as we have seen, by Miss Edgeworth and practised by Miss Owenson and others before Scott had established the corresponding Scottish Novel; but, as was natural, the example of what Scott had done for the sister-land helped to stimulate new Irish genius in the patriotic direction. Besides some of the later tales of Miss Edgeworth, we have, therefore, as specimens of the Irish Novel since Scott, the fictions of Banim, Crofton Croker, Griffin, Carleton, and Lover, and some of those of Mr. Lever, and Mrs. S. C. Hall.

As regards (3) THE NOVEL OF ENGLISH LIFE AND MANNERS, it may be said, I think, that, though there have been specimens of it, there has been a deficiency of the variety that would exactly correspond to the Scottish Novels and the Irish Novels, as just described. Seeing that the majority of the British Novelists since Scott have been Englishmen or Englishwomen, they have, of course, laid their scenes in England, and have, in a sense, made the delineation of English life and manners a professed part of their purpose. In this sense, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mr. Peacock, Theodore Hook, Mr. Plumer Ward, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Trollope, and, later still, Lady Blessington, Miss Martineau, Mr. Samuel Warren, Douglas Jerrold,

Mrs. Crowe, Miss Jewsbury, Mr. Lewes, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mrs. Marsh, Miss Mulock and others have all been novelists of English life-some of them continuing the exquisite style of English domestic fiction which had been begun by Miss Austen, and others introducing original peculiarities into the novel, and extending its range farther over the surface and more into the corners of English life. In their hands, however, or in the hands of most of them, the Novel of English life and manners has not had that express nationality of character which is found in the contemporary Scottish and Irish Novels. Whether from the very variety of life and manners over so broad a country as England -Yorkshire exhibiting one set of characteristics, Devonshire another, Kent and Sussex another, and so on; or whether because what could be done in the way of a novel of national English characteristics had already been done to a sufficient extent by Fielding and others of the eighteenth century, and there remained no such interest for British readers in that English system of life which was becoming the normal and conventional one for all, as in the outstanding bits of still unbooked barbaresque presented by Scotland and Ireland-certain it is that, in most of the novelists I have named, we have

only a certain sublimation of English life as presented or supposed to be presented in the uppermost layers of society over the country at large, or as concentrated in London and its suburbs. In the tales of Miss Mitford, and in some of those of Theodore Hook, Mr. Peacock, and perhaps also of Sir Bulwer Lytton and some others, without taking into account Dickens and Thackeray, I believe there are illustrations of English nature and life in their non-conventional and non-metropolitan varieties; and it is worthy of remark that of late this tendency to the illustration of the outstanding barbaresque and primitive in English society itself has been gaining strength. Miss Brontë made a refreshing innovation in English novel-writing when she drew her characters and scenes and even portions of her dialect from her native Yorkshire; Mrs. Gaskell has followed with her pictures of artisan life, and her specimens of provincial dialect in Lancashire; and Mr. Kingsley has broken ground, as an artist, in Devonshire and other counties. There are rich fields of yet unbooked English life both in northern and in southern England; and the literary centralization of English life in London has been owing, perhaps, to the centralization of the literary craft itself there.

Out of this centralization, however, there has