Dickens, till _Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never attempted it.

Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs.Marsh, and perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely.

But as a general gift--a characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle of the century.
It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book _Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to.

It was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.
But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_.

The not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing, could make columns of fun out of it.