of practitioners.  The novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which Scott and Miss Austen began to publish.  They had therefore—­as their elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had not—­time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair had produced or which they had first expressed.  And they had even greater advantages than this.  They had had time to assimilate, likewise, the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members.  They profited by thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of former days.  One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they also profited by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from 1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700.  They had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost or even begun to lose.  They had wider travel, more extended occupations and interests, many other new things to draw upon.  And, lastly, they had some important special incidents and movements—­the new arrangement of political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others—­to give suggestion and impetus to novels of the specialist kind.  Nay, they had not only the great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to complete their education and the machinery of its development.

The most remarkable feature of this renouveau, as has been both directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel.  Not that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss Austen’s death.  But the external advantages just enumerated had failed it:  and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the service of fiction generally.  A little more gift and a good deal more taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:  but she left them for her son to accomplish.  Attempts and “tries” at it had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached, especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable Emilia Wyndham (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly described by a sister novelist as the “book where the woman breaks her desk open with her head,” but which has real power and exercised real influence for no short time.

This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and relied chiefly on artistic presentment—­on treatment rather than on subject.  It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or to make the mainsprings of her books.