Unless the novelists do contrive to enlarge their borders, and take in more of life, that misfortune awaits them which befell their ancestors just before the death of Scott. About the year 1830 there was a sudden crash of the novel. The public found itself abandoned to Lady Blessington and Mr. Plumer Ward, and it abruptly closed its account with the novelists. The large prices which had been, for twenty years past, paid for novels were no longer offered. The book-clubs throughout the kingdom collapsed, or else excluded novels. When fiction re-appeared, after this singular epoch of eclipse, it had learned its lesson, and the new writers were men who put into their work their best observation and ripest experience. It does not appear that in the thirties any one understood what was happening. The stuff produced by the novelists was so ridiculous and ignoble that "the nonsinse of that divil of a Bullwig" seemed absolutely unrivalled in its comparative sublimity, although these were the days of _Ernest Maltravers_. It never occurred to the authors when the public suddenly declined to read their books (it read "Bullwig's," in the lack of anything else) that the fault was theirs. The same excuses were made that are made now,--"necessary to write down to a wide audience;" "obliged to supply the kind of article demanded;" "women the only readers to be catered for;" "mammas so solicitous for the purity of what is laid before their daughters." And the crash came. The crash will come again, if the novelists do not take care. The same silly piping of the loves of the drawing-room, the same obsequious attitude towards a supposititious public clamouring for the commonplace, inspire the majority of the novel-writers of to-day. Happily, we have, what our fathers in 1835 had not, half a dozen careful and vigorous men of letters who write, not what the foolish publishers ask for, but what they themselves choose to give. The future rests with these few recognised masters of fiction, and with their successors, the vigorous younger men who are preparing to take their place. What are these novelists going to do? They were set down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate called Life, and because one corner of it--the two or three acres hedged about, and called the kitchen-garden of Love--offered peculiar attractions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have neglected the other ninety-seven acres. The result is that by over-pressing their garden, and forcing crop after crop out of it, it is well-nigh exhausted, and will soon refuse to respond to the incessant hoe and spade; while, all the time, the rest of the estate, rich and almost virgin soil, is left to cover itself with the weeds of newspaper police-reports.