Each of the two—­Fielding and Richardson—­had his host of followers.  Abroad Richardson won immediate recognition; in France Diderot went so far as to compare him with Homer and Moses!  He gave the first impulse to modern French fiction.  At home, less happily, he set going the sentimental school, and it was only when that had passed away that—­in the delicate and subtle character-study of Miss Austen—­his influence comes to its own.  Miss Austen carried a step further, and with an observation which was first hand and seconded by intuitive knowledge, Richardson’s analysis of the feminine mind, adding to it a delicate and finely humorous feeling for character in both sexes which was all her own.  Fielding’s imitators (they number each in his own way, and with his own graces or talent added his rival Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith) kept the way which leads to Thackeray and Dickens—­the main road of the English Novel.

That road was widened two ways by Sir Walter Scott.  The historical novel, which had been before his day either an essay in anachronism with nothing historical in it but the date, or a laborious and uninspired compilation of antiquarian research, took form and life under his hands.  His wide reading, stored as it was in a marvellously retentive memory, gave him all the background he needed to achieve a historical setting, and allowed him to concentrate his attention on the actual telling of his story; to which his genial and sympathetic humanity and his quick eye for character gave a humorous depth and richness that was all his own.  It is not surprising that he made the historical novel a literary vogue all over Europe.  In the second place, he began in his novels of Scottish character a sympathetic study of nationality.  He is not, perhaps, a fair guide to contemporary conditions; his interests were too romantic and too much in the past to catch the rattle of the looms that caught the ear of Galt, and if we want a picture of the great fact of modern Scotland, its industrialisation, it is to Galt we must go.  But in his comprehension of the essential character of the people he has no rival; in it his historical sense seconded his observation, and the two mingling gave us the pictures whose depth of colour and truth make his Scottish novels, Old Mortality, The Antiquary, Redgauntlet, the greatest things of their kind in literature.

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The peculiarly national style of fiction founded by Fielding and carried on by his followers reached its culminating point in Vanity Fair.  In it the reader does not seem to be simply present at the unfolding of a plot the end of which is constantly present to the mind of the author and to which he is always consciously working, every incident having a bearing on the course of the action; rather he feels himself to be the spectator of a piece of life which is too large and complex to be under the control of a creator, which moves to its close not under the