At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any other book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which we have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even to a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its proper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmly therein. Either it has some _arrière pensée_, some second purpose, besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this, it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in "revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinary course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical disquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other of the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_ from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self. But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious criticism--while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time--the novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content with giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. For even Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, had failed to accommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.