Of its kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novel in the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensish character-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascal Captain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make us angry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which is not poetical and hardly even just.
The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be without practitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after a fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here.
Its most remarkable representatives perhaps--men, however, of very different tastes and abilities--were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry Shorthouse.

The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a remarkable book--almost a kind to itself--_John Inglesant_ (1880), a half historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life, never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed tried little.

The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failing to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, broke through at last in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ with a series of studies of country life, _The Gatekeeper at Home_ (1878), and afterwards turned these into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly any character, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere of these same sketches.

His health was weak, and he died in early middle age, leaving a problem of a character exactly opposed to the other.
Would Mr.Shorthouse, if he had not been a well-to-do man of business, but obliged to write for his living, have done more and better work?
Would Jefferies, if he had been more fortunate in education, occupation, and means, and furnished with better health, have co-ordinated and expanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" than the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-_paysagiste_, which he has left us?
These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may draw attention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes and fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prose fiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments, appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction and popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of literature, and to give the public, not what they wanted in the form which they chose, but something at least made up in the form that the public wanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomed to purchase.
The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as we have seen, in the direction of the novel _proper_--the character-study of modern ordinary life.

But, even as early as _Esmond_ and _Hypatia_, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott, and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it for the last quarter of a century.