experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb _Old Wives’ Tale_, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest “long novel” that has been written in English in the English fashion in this generation, and now in _Clayhanger_ and its promised collaterals, he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the Continental movement towards the novel of amplitude. While the _Old Wives’ Tale_ is discursive, _Clayhanger_ is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement in perfection. I name _Jean Christophe_ as a sort of archetype in this connection, because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds, that comes to us now _via_ Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France. The great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of Flaubert, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_. Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction—Turgenev was not more austere and restrained—broke out at last into this gay, sad miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it is—and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But if Flaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from the restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I will maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest _artist_—I lay stress upon that word artist—that Great Britain has ever produced in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne....