Concerning the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, so much is daily written that remark is superfluous. A master of observation of all that had rarely been observed, a generous heart, an original and abundant humorist, the greatest source of mirth in our century, Dickens appears to wear less well than his rival. The unapproached merits of Thackeray’s style must preserve him in literature; his pathos is rare and unforced; his form of humor is as permanent as that of Fielding, and as successfully matched by his phrasing. Even his verse, mirthful or melancholy, does not fade, and has its own place on the borderland of poetry. George Eliot’s fame, too, must revive the success of her earlier and more humorous novels, before she became too fond of the Spencerian philosophy, and took herself too seriously, a natural result of adulation. Charlotte Brontë, in the same way, has been, as it were, rediscovered amid a chorus of fresh applauses, and with perhaps rather too curious investigations. In America, after Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mrs. Beecher Stowe were the novelists most generally admired in England, when Thackeray and Dickens were verging to their decline. It is, indeed, to be regretted that Dr. Holmes did not write more fiction when in his prime. His excellent and original _Elsie Venner_, and _Guardian Angel_, with their humorous pictures of real life and their thread of phantasy, half mystical, half scientific, border (as often in the _Poet_ and _Professor at the Breakfast Table_) on the ground of “psychical research.” Dr. Holmes was not merely, in verse and prose, an exquisite wit, but a man of rare knowledge, a man of science, and a sturdy defender of the purity of the language. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, on the other hand, took the world by storm with a vivid tract in the form of fiction; a book now not easy to criticise, but which can still move to laughter and tears. It is my “insular ignorance” which prevents me from appreciating other American fictions of that age, before the days of writers still happily living and working: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W. D. Howells, Henry James, and scores of others, who, being here to speak for themselves, shall not be commented upon in this place. With Mr. Howells, as a critic, I have tried to break lances, while ready to admit one of his main contentions, that the art of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and others of our fathers would have profited much by being a finer art, by condensation, by omission, by avoidance of the superfluous. But that our modern fiction is a greater art, that romance and story-telling and adventure are obsolete, or ought to be obsolete, that I can never admit while human nature is human nature. Mankind will never be content, in fiction, with tales of the psychology of the ordinary person; ordinary as we are, we desire to be, like Homer’s Heracles, conversant with great adventures. Mr. Howells perhaps may