That Scott’s variety should be taken up first, and should for a time have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing—­was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it.  But the general shortcomings (as they have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly discovered provinces.  And they gave admirable work of various kinds—­work especially admirable if we remember that there was no general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere, about 1830.  If it were in any way possible—­similar supposings have been admitted in literature very often—­it would be extremely interesting to take a person ex hypothesi fairly acquainted with the rest of literature—­English, foreign, European, and classical—­but who knew nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat, even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished work of Thackeray (Dickens’s is, as has been said, mainly a sport of genius), and to turn him loose on this work.  I do him the justice to suppose that he would find not a few faults:  I shall also do him the justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, ex hypothesi furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them) would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly.  If you added the minorities of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name was Emma) who wrote Whitefriars and other historical romances in the forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like The Dutch in the Medway and The Camp of Refuge—­if, I say, you gave him these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without sighing for anything further.  But undoubtedly it might be contended that something further was needed:  and it came.  This was verisimilitude—­the holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to attain:  it seems not to be easy even to recognise.  I have seen it said that the reason which makes it “hopeless for many people even to try to get through Pickwick” (their state itself must be “hopeless” enough, and it is to be hoped there are not “many” of them) is that it “describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day.”  Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative.