knighthood for him), is distinctly remarkable, especially in the light of succeeding events.  Most of the unfavourable criticisms passed upon Besant’s novel-work were in the main the utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it necessary to “down” established reputations.  But it would be impossible for any competent critic, however much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship, not to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have been illustrating from others, of the system of novel-production a la douzaine.  In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutary conditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life may or must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying “grist for the mill”; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought in all cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are too often set to a sort of corvee, a day-task, a tale of bricks.  It is, one allows, hard to prevent this:  and yet nothing is more certain that bricks so made are not the best material to be wrought into any really “star-y-pointing pyramid” that shall defy the operations of time.

A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins, has not yet been mentioned except by glances.  He was a little older than most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens, whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work to develop.  In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as novelist:  and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form, not a few of them were actually dramatised.  He began as early as 1850—­the dividing year—­with Antonina:  but his three great triumphs in the “sensation” novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White (1860), and No Name (1862).  Throughout the sixties and a little later, in Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1870), perhaps The New Magdalen (1873), and even as late as 1875 in The Law and the Lady, his work continued to be eagerly read.  But the taste for it waned:  and its author’s last fifteen years or so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did not tend to keep it up in quality.  Although Collins had a considerable amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever be put permanently high.  It has a certain resemblance in method to Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading, sometimes at any rate, to a violent “revolution” (in the old dramatic sense) at the end.  Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen Vanstone’s desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal