But his last completed book, _Catriona_ (1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important respect--that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his books had previously displayed.

The general opinion, too, was that the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ (1897), which he left a fragment at his death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly laboured style in which he had hitherto written.

For us, however, his style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt against it.

It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and so not to be dwelt on now.
Very late in the century the genius of Mr.William Morris turned from verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and suggestion.

These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank no-time and no-place of Romance itself.