Captain Frederick Marryat was popular in his day, but he seems to be little read in the present age. His most popular novel was Mr. Midshipman Easy, and The Phantom Ship is said to be the best sea novel ever written. The Pacha of Many Tales is a collection of most romantic and exciting short stories, told by one man, and probably the best worth reading of anything Marryat has left. The last of the great historical novelists was Charles Reade, whose Cloister and the Hearth is considered by many one of the greatest novels of this kind ever written. But the fame of this is shared by his Dickenesque stories Never Too Late to Mend, Hard Cash, and Put Yourself in His Place. Among modern historical novelists Gen. Lew Wallace with his Ben-Hur, a Tale of the Christ, and the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz with his Quo Vadis and other novels, are most likely to become classic. CHAPTER X. _THE REALISTIC NOVELISTS--DICKENS, THACKERAY, BALZAC._ The pendulum of human interest swings quickly from one side to the other. Within five years of the appearance of the last of the Waverley novels there appeared in England a novelist as great as Scott and in every way his direct antithesis. Scott was a splendid story-teller. With a swift brush he painted large scenes and large characters. His brilliant pageantry moved easily and steadily from the beginning to the end of more than thirty novels, most of which were published in three stately volumes. In 1835 came Dickens, with his disconnected sketches of ordinary types of Englishmen. His first great success, Pickwick, was written from week to week as it was published. The author never knew three chapters ahead what would happen to his characters; nor did it matter. He had his characters, he had Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller and the rest; what mattered anything else? As the story went on something would happen to them, and that was enough. And with Dickens we have an entirely different style of writing. The Waverley novels are written with more or less fine language, large words, sweeping phrases; Pickwick was a great bubbling mass of sentiment and emotion, pathos, humour, the cold feeling, the hot feeling, the shaky feeling, the melancholy feeling, the riotous feeling--one might go on forever. With every turn of his pen this new magician plays upon our heart-strings, possesses us, fills us, makes us laugh or cry at will. The very collocation of his words causes our flesh to quiver and the blood to leap in our veins, and holds our attention spell-bound. What Jane Austen did in her fine way, to the despair of Scott, Dickens did in his big, coarse, splashing way, and with ten times the genius.