For _Idalia's_ above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the _timeserving_ or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--to call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. _Betsy_ and _Jenny_ are so different from _Idalia_ and her group that a critic of the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they must be by different authors. We know that they were _not_: and we know also the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that _Pamela_ and her brother and their groups _ont passé par là_.[9] This fact is most interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood was a decidedly clever woman. [9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined _Betsy_ with _Amelia_, and sneered at both. At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good girl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly "straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_; but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again (though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.