“... ‘They call me Tummas, but I ayn’t got no second name; but now I’m married I mean to take my wife’s, for she has been baptised, and so has got two.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl with the vacant face and the back like a grasshopper, ‘I be a reg’lar born Christian, and my mother afore me, and that’s what few gals in the yard can say. Thomas will take to it himself when work is slack; and he believes now in Our Lord and Saviour Pontius Pilate, who was crucified to save our sins, and in Moses, Goliath, and the rest of the apostles.’ ‘Ah, me!’ thought Morley, ‘and could not they spare one missionary from Tahiti for their fellow-countrymen at Wodgate?’” * * * * * I must turn to the romantic and the picturesque in Disraeli’s fiction. It is a large subject, but it need not necessitate a long treatment. The Brontës and Bulwer Lytton, in opposed spheres and with opposite material, are perhaps the only modern pure romantics in English fiction, before the romantic revival of the last twenty years or so had set in. In the early nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott had headed another romantic revival. Miss Austen, however,--the miniaturist of realism--recalled fiction in her delicate manner to the beaten high-road of the eighteenth. Dickens, romantic by instinct, dwelt on the horrible and grotesque, and was more melodramatic than strictly romantic. Thackeray, sternly combating the infinite romance of his own nature, disclaimed a hero, and proved sentimental rather than romantic. Trollope, who photographed feeling, abominated romance. George Eliot set out as a romantic, but she soon became gloriously whelmed in the vortex of scientific psychology. Others, who lack her imagination, have since followed in her track. We have been treated to analytic presentations of life, where some five persons engage in a mutual war of motive, and the very reasons for turning a door-handle are minutely involved in character. On the one hand, we had the English and French sensationalists elaborately unravelling mysteries; on the other, the boudoir psychologists as elaborately anatomising moods. The great “naturalist” school supervened with its claims to scientise misery. Victor Hugo’s romanticism was doomed by the merciless lancet of these literary surgeons. And throughout--even now, in the main, using “romance” more with regard to situation and expression than to events--the purely and simply heroic and adventurous has lost ground. Mind rather than action engrossed a great part of late nineteenth-century fiction.