But there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not merely harp on one string.
A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who have taken it as a special subject, is the "Tractarian" or High-Church novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had began, had no small share in popularising it.

The earlier Evangelicals had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views, especially among the young.

Mrs.Sherwood in _Little Henry and his Bearer_ and _The Fairchild Family_ (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth" (Browne or Tonna) are examples.

But the High-Church party, in accordance with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century, always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher standard of scholarship and of general literary culture.

Its early efforts in fiction--according to the curious and most interesting law which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large--were not strictly novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind.