With the name of =Mrs Oliphant (1828-1897)=, who has recently died, I may fitly close this survey of Victorian fiction. Mrs Oliphant struck the note of the era alike in her versatility and in her lack of thoroughness. She was so versatile that she once offered to write a whole number of _Blackwood's Magazine_, a publication to which she was for years a valued contributor. And she would have done it with fair effectiveness. That she wrote good fiction is now generally acknowledged. She wrote also biography, criticism, and every form of prose. Her "Makers of Florence" has been a popular history,--it treats of Dante, Giotto, and Savonarola,--as her "Life of Edward Irving" has been a popular biography. She wrote many other books apart from her fiction, "A History of Eighteenth Century Literature," a "Memoir of Principal Tulloch," biographies of Cervantes and Molière, and a volume on "Dress." But she was not a good critic, nor was she a very accurate student. It is upon her novels that her fame will have to rest. "Salem Chapel," a skilful delineation of a minister and his congregation, has been compared to George Eliot's "Silas Marner." "Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland" (1849) was her first novel and "The Lady's Walk" (1897) her last, and in the intervening years she probably wrote sixty or seventy stories, each of them containing indications of a genius which, with more concentration, would have given her an enduring place in English fiction. FOOTNOTES: [8] Charles Kingsley's novels and miscellaneous writings are published by Macmillan & Co., in twenty-nine volumes. Henry Kingsley's novels have been recently issued by Ward & Lock in twelve volumes. [9] "The Collected Works of Charles Lever." Downey & Co. [10] A New Library Edition of the novels of Wilkie Collins has just been published by Chatto and Windus. CHAPTER III The Historians The reign of Victoria has been pre-eminently the reign of the historian in our literature. Greater poets we had seen in the reigns of the Georges, greater essayists in the reign of Anne. But Grote and Carlyle, Macaulay and Gardiner, Bishop Stubbs and Dr Freeman, had no counterparts in an earlier age--always excepting the one great name of Gibbon. Before them there were chroniclers of contemporary events and pamphleteers under the guise of historians, but little more. Goldsmith's histories are the laughing-stock of those to whom the modern methods of research are familiar, and even Hume had little of the spirit of the genuine student. Hallam and Lingard were the pioneers in this branch of literature, although both of them had done their work before Queen Victoria came to the throne.