Only by keeping perspective can you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative completeness.
Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor "Mr.Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had disappointed his prognostications.

Literature, it has been said, is the incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.
But this does not affect the retrospect of the past.

There we are on perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in surety now.
We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and slow-yielding one in English.

Although Thoms's _Early English Prose Romances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in verse.

Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably from its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help: but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no possible sleight of weighing.