By these later years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.
"Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the destruction of the actual volumes read.

Novels were rarely produced in a very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are represented.

We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general notice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one of them lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as it happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion unusually striking.

The description, as some readers will have anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin.

But the smaller fry must be taken first.
It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs.Bennett's _Anna_ and Mrs.Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_.