There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time, whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called the "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholars were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added. The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were directly influenced by itself. One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson, but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need have felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible Carrier-and-Fouché developments in a favourable and fostering atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _Barham Downs_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not _The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and the still later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796). This last has sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child, written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and _Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house) to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The earlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne, though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud