Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in the same way, together.  They were all acquaintances of the present writer, and one of them was his friend:  moreover, he is quite certain that he could not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only takes credit to himself for not having attempted to do so.  These are James Payn, William Black, and Sir Walter Besant.  Mr. Payn was an extremely agreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which he perhaps took pretty early—­consoling himself for a total absence of high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation of good-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious, half affected belief that other men’s delight in their schools, their universities, the great classics of the past, etc., was blague.  He never made this in the least offensive; he never made any one of his fifty or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the subject required it) amusing.  There never was any novelist less difficult to read a first time:  I really do not know that it would be extremely difficult to read him a second; but also I have seldom come across a novelist with whom I was so little inclined to try it.  It is a great thing, no doubt, as has been said, from a certain point of view—­that of pastime—­that the reading of a novel should be easy and pleasant.  But perhaps this is not all that you are entitled to ask of it.  And as Mr. Payn began with Poems, and some other suggestive books, I am inclined to think that perhaps he did not always regard literature as a thing of the kind of a superior railway sandwich.

It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William Black entertained no such idea; for his actual debuts were something like what long afterwards were called problem-novels, and In Silk Attire (1869), Kilmeny (1870), and the charming Daughter of Heth (1871) attempted a great deal besides mere amusement.  It is true that no one of them—­not even the last—­could be called an entire success:  a “little more powder” was wanted to send the shots home, and such flight as they achieved did not even seem to be aimed at any distinct and worthy object.  But fortunately for his pocket, unfortunately for his fame, he hit the public taste of the time with a sort of guidebook-novel in The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) and A Princess of Thule (1873), and was naturally tempted to continue it, or to branch off only into not very strong stories of society.  Once he made an effort at combining tragic romance with this latter kind in Macleod of Dare (1878), but, though this was nearer to a success than some of his critics admitted, it was not quite a success:  and though he wrote fully a score of novels after it, he never came nearer the actual bull’s eye.  In fact his later work was not up to a very good average.