The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.

The deficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed, for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by the ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count for something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something more.

As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the causes which made the _historical_ novel impossible until very late in the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then.

Perhaps, without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death.

In the interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from failure..