It was indeed almost entirely independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century.

For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours.

The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.
At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen.

The average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division outside of Fielding.

But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of the two periods.