By 1760 Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had established the English novel, though Smollett's master-piece, _Humphrey Clinker_, did not appear until 1771, the year of his death. Fiction developed in various directions. In _The Vicar of Wakefield_ Goldsmith, in spite of his literary conservatism, portrayed manners and character with a perfectly natural grace, and with a delightful delicacy of touch. Laurence Sterne, the humorous and indecent prebendary of York, illustrates the prevalence of sensibility in contemporary society in his _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_. It is a curious characteristic of the time that displays of emotion by men and women alike were reckoned as proofs of genuine fineness of feeling. Sterne's sentiment and discursiveness found several feeble imitators. The taste for antiquity was strong in Horace Walpole, and his admiration for "the gothick," expressed in the pointed windows and sham battlements of his house at Strawberry hill, inspired his romance, _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764), which began the romantic movement in fiction. To this movement, destined to be adorned by the genius of Scott, belong Beckford's _Vathek_, Clara Reeve's _Old English Baron_, and the once widely popular tales of mystery of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, as he was called after his best-known romance (1795). The novel of manners was developed by Fanny Burney's (Madame d'Arblay) _Evelina_ (1778), founded on acute observation, dealing almost wholly with every-day life, replete with satire, and written with extraordinary freshness and vivacity. _Castle Rackrent_, the first of Maria Edgeworth's Irish tales, appeared in the last year of the century. Before its close, too, Jane Austen was writing novels which as yet could find no publisher, though in their faultless execution, their delicate humour, and their life-like representation of the society with which their author was familiar they remain unrivalled. [Sidenote: _SERIOUS PROSE WORKS._]