The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer of the drama may be too complimentary—­I do not think it is, except in so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far than either drama itself or novel—­but it is certainly not an altogether comfortable one.  For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen who discover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid.  And there are those who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising.  The student who is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist:  for the one thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness.  But he might admit—­while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the dryest of dry bones—­that circumstances are not incompatible with something like a decay in the novel:  just as they were with a decay in the drama.  The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century—­not too well regulated; stirred at once by the sinking force of the mediaeval and the rising force of the modern spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody, and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried in business—­was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this disorderly abundance of dramatic creation—­tragic, comic, and in all the varieties that Hamlet catalogues or satirises.  The mid-nineteenth century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth.  It had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war, where the country had taken the most glorious part possible.  It also had a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form.  Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not monopolised the helm.  There was in society, though it was not strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of “good form.”  Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for “education” and ignorance of letters.  The national fancy for sport was in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of questionableness and not yet plunged in another.  The chair of the chief of the kinds of literature—­poetry—­which always exercises a singular influence over the lower forms, was still worthily occupied and surrounded.  And, above all, the appetite for the novel was still eager, fresh, and not in the least sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when it has to be whetted by