The novels of Richard Cumberland, “Henry,” “Arundel,” and “John de Lancaster,” contain some well-drawn characters and readable sketches of life.  But Cumberland had little originality.  He aimed without success at Fielding’s constructive excellence, and imitated that great master’s humor, only to reproduce his coarseness.  The character of Ezekiel Daw, the Methodist, in “Henry,” is fair and just, and contrasts very favorably with the libellous representations of the Methodist preachers in Graves’ “Spiritual Quixote,” and other contemporary novels.  Another writer of fiction of considerable prominence in his day, but of none in ours, was Dr. Moore, whose “Zeluco” contained some very lively “Views of human nature, taken from life and manners, foreign and domestic,” but also some very disagreeable exhibitions of human degradation and vice.

The influence of the French Revolution in England is apparent in the works of several novelists who wrote at the end of the eighteenth century.  Thomas Holcroft embodied radical views in novels now quite forgotten.[197] Robert Bage has left four works containing opinions of a revolutionary character—­“Barham Downs,” “James Wallace,” “The Fair Syrian,” and “Mount Henneth.”  These novels are written in the form of a series of letters and have little narrative interest.  The author has striven, sometimes successfully, at a powerful delineation of character, but his works are too evidently a vehicle for his political and philosophical opinions.  He represents with unnatural consistency the upper classes as invariably corrupt and tyrannical, and the lower as invariably honest and deserving.  His theories are not only inartistically prominent, but are worthless and immoral.  He looks upon a tax-gatherer as a thief, and condones feminine unchastity as a trivial and unimportant offence.

The novelist most deeply embued with the doctrines of the French Revolution was William Godwin—­a man of great literary ambition, and less literary capacity.  His “Life of Chaucer” has the merits of a compilation, but not those of an original literary work.  His political and social writings were merely reproductions of French revolutionary views, and were entirely discredited by Malthus’ attacks upon them.  The same lack of originality and of independent power characterized Godwin’s novels.  They all have a patch-work effect, and in all may be found the traces of imitation.  “St. Leon” and “Mandeville"[198] are dull attempts in the direction of the historical novel.  “Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling” embodies some of the author’s social views, and contains evidence of an imitation of Fielding and Smollett, in which only their coarseness is successfully copied.