Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others, though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures.

The first referred to (the second in order of appearance), _The Water Babies_ (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive _fatrasie_ of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.
But _Two Tears Ago_ (1857), though containing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had been well restrained in _Hypatia_ and _Westward Ho!_ by central and active interests of story and character.

"Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and "rectified." While in the much later _Hereward the Wake_ (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure as in _Two Tears Ago_, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader.

But the whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this time.
This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel field--Charles Reade (b.

1814), Anthony Trollope (b.