Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Malcolm Farmer, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT BY SIDNEY LANIER LECTURER IN JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF "THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE" NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1883 GRANT, FAIRES & RODGERS, PHILADELPHIA. * * * * * PREFATORY NOTE. The following chapters were originally delivered as public lectures at Johns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr. Lanier lived to prepare them for the press, he would probably have recast them to some extent; but the present editor has not felt free to make any changes from the original manuscript, beyond the omission of a few local and occasional allusions, and the curtailment of several long extracts from well-known writers. Although each is complete in itself, this work and its foregoer, _The Science of English Verse_, were intended to be parts of a comprehensive philosophy of formal and substantial beauty in literature, which, unhappily, the author did not live to develop. W. H. B. * * * * * THE ENGLISH NOVEL AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT. I. The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure of delivering in this hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt the most remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and the most noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas in definite relations, which have acquired currency among men--namely, the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry. That exposition began by reducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; and having thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science, and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly upon this century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the most minute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.