Some even of his books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in more of other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten.

A run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the training and betting preliminary to them--these form the real and almost the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy could make them up out of a number or two of the _Field_, a sufficient list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions.

This, in fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally: though perhaps it does not show quite so glaringly in other cases.

Yet, even here, that note of the fiction of the whole century--its tendency to "accaparate" and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of mankind--shows itself notably enough.
So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set going hosts of imitations.

_Tom Brown's School Days_, for instance (1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad.