themes, as a lover of music closes his ear against familiar melodies ground out on a barrel-organ, and when men gifted with the power to feel and write will be paralysed if they attempt earnest work with the recollection that almost this exact thing has been done before, and has passed into household words or speech.
To some it may seem that the novel, which has been a very potent instrument in supplanting the drama, is never likely to die out, and may in a satisfactory measure take the place of poetry. No one can question that a great amount of very high ability has been spent upon the novel during the present century. Scott and George Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray, Hawthorne and Manzoni, Balzac and Charles de Bernard are only a few in a host of distinguished names. Tried by a rough and popular but fairly good test, these writers have all created types that the world has agreed to accept as very masterly. Scott, though there are signs that he is being forgotten, popularised a conception of Scotch character in its chivalrous capabilities and homely work for which his countrymen owe him a deep debt of gratitude. No other writer has done so much to invest the life of a small community with imperishable interest. Of the other writers mentioned, one George Eliot has been almost Shakespearean in the power of putting life into every touch; while Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, and Manzoni, working more elaborately and at length, have made characters such as Pecksniff and Becky Sharp, Le Pere Goriot and Don Abbondio, appreciable additions to the world's repertory of dramatic memories. Of Hawthorne it may safely be said that his idealism was poetical in a very high degree, and yet that one can hardly imagine it expressed intelligibly in verse.
