has a whole month apparently before him?  It is pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation:  and so did a great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray.  It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever:  and I am by no means sure that some of Dickens’s worst faults, especially the ostentatious plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as Little Dorrit—­the plot which marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at all—­were not largely due to the system.

Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular.  The very big people kept up their prices:  but everybody else was glad to get into “popular libraries,” yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as soon as possible.

It will have been seen that the present writer puts the novel of 1845-1870 very high:  he would indeed put it, in its own compartment, almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825.  Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous:  and to set it down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth.  There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their nonage.  One does not care to dwell long on such a point:  but it may just be observed that the present writer’s withers are hardly even pinched, let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this rather idle notion.  For some of what he is praising as the best novels were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to be an undergraduate.  Now acute observers know that what may be called the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to thirty-five.  I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered Molieres, week by week or day by day, count their years between these limits. Beati illi from some points of view, but from others, if they go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!

But all this is really idle.  A critic is not right or wrong because he is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes the present.  He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like the right things in the right way.  And it is a simple historical fact, capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens (and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of its climax.