Trollope and Miss Austen--like Shakespeare and Richardson--stand so absolutely alone that nothing very profitable can be said about them by a writer analysing British fiction in search of traces of main-currents of tradition. They were both so aloof, so engrossed, so contemplative--and so masterly--that beyond saying that some people prefer _The Warden_ to _Framley Parsonage_ and _Sense and Sensibility_ to _Pride and Prejudice_, and that others think the reverse, there is very little to be said. These at least are authentic writers: they neither flare out into passages that are all super-genius--as in Dickens’ passage about the dry leaves at Mr. Pecksniff’s back-door, nor do they descend to the intolerable banalities of the endings of _Copperfield_ or _Vanity Fair_. But, as in the case of Turgenev, the aspiring writer can learn very little of either. These novelists write well, know how to construct a novel so as to keep the interest going with every word until the last page--but after that all you can say is that they were just temperaments, and quiet ones at that. Inimitable--that is what they are. You could imitate Oscar Wilde--but never Trollope giving you the still, slow stream of English country and small-town life. Nor could anyone else ever give you such pure agony of interest and engrossment as you can get out of the financial troubles over a few pounds of the poor clergyman in _Framley Parsonage_. I shiver every time that I think of that book. But once those tributes are paid it is astonishing to look back on the course of the novel in England from the earliest times to say, 1895, Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and then the few Victorians of whom we have been treating. It is an astonishingly small crop, even if you let me add Marryat and add for yourselves the other solitary figure of Mark Twain, one of the greatest prose-writers the English language has produced. In the meantime, across the Channel, the main stream of the Novel pursued its slow course. It had begun with Richardson. His vogue with the French would be incomprehensible if we were not able to consider that the French Revolution was, in the end, a sentimental movement, basing itself on civic, parental, filial, and rhetorical virtues. If the French beheaded Marie Antoinette it was in order that Monsieur Durand, stay-maker of the Passage Choiseul, might be sufficiently well-fed to utter tearful homilies to his children; for homilies uttered by starving peasants with their bones pushing through their skins and rags--such homilies would little impress their children with the solid advantages of virtuous careers. And the moment you consider pre-revolutionary France from that angle the appeal of the author of _Pamela_ becomes instantly blindingly clear.