But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly how the general influences which were to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new. Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else. The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with