The characteristic type of English novel was defined by Richardson, Fielding, and their school at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It aimed at a dramatic representation of contemporary life and manners; it took, in fact, the place of the drama as the popular form of literature. With the decay of the Fielding novel came a reaction, and opposed to the lusty and vivid realism of _Tom Jones_ and _Humphrey Clinker_ we get the sham mediaevalism, the dungeon-keeps, the echoing chambers, the hollow-voiced spectres, and the absurd sentiment of Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and its imitators. This was a sort of side stream in the history of the novel, which nevertheless created the taste for historical romance, fed later by the novels of Scott. Scott stands apart from the main stream of English fiction, though his style exercised an immense influence on later novelists. After the mediaeval relapse, the contemporary novel of manners was continued at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. The latter died in 1817; between 1814 and 1832 Scott's novels fill the field of fiction; and then, between about 1835 and 1860, come Dickens and Thackeray with their contemporaries, of whom perhaps the most remarkable were Lytton and Disraeli. In none of these writers, however, must we look for the foundation of the characteristic Victorian novel--the novel of George Eliot and George Meredith. The founder of that novel was Charlotte Brontë. Her _Jane Eyre_ and Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ were published in the same year, 1848, and were reviewed together in a famous number of the _Quarterly_. The two works represent two distinct schools of fiction. Between the Dickens-Thackeray novel and the Brontë-Eliot novel there is a great gulf fixed. Dickens and Thackeray stand out from their time like two solitary giants. Perhaps now it might be well to remind you briefly of the main facts in the literary history of the two men. Dickens's first great work, _Pickwick_, appeared in 1837, five years after the death of Scott. It was at once received with acclamation. His next book, _Oliver Twist_, though it must have come as a sort of shock after _Pickwick_, did not stem the tide of appreciation. Like Oliver himself, every one was soon asking for more. They did not ask in vain. During the next two decades, the forties and fifties, Dickens poured forth novel after novel with surprising rapidity. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Squeers, Micawber soon became household words. Dickens won a popularity of which we can form no true conception. There has been nothing like it in our time. England and America were taken by storm; even France was infected with the prevailing enthusiasm.