We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers:  we are but too well aware of their failures and defects.  Lytton indited not a little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his conventional cynicisms.  There are passages in George Eliot’s romances which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be laughing at the public behind his mask.  Yet the good sense of mankind remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole.

The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses evermore drop out of memory as time goes on.  The world loves its bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like an examiner marking a student’s paper.  Thus the men and women of the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales are a source of happiness; and it would be perverse to maintain that any living men have reached that level.  We can see no trace that Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the Antiquary. Oliver Twist, the Last Days of Pompeii, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, have more readers than ever.  And I find the Last Chronicle of Barset, Lothair, and Silas Marner as fresh as they were a quarter of a century ago.

We all admit that there are delightful writers still.  I am not about to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them.  If any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the entire Barsetshire series, that Dickens could not have bettered the Two Drummer Boys of Rudyard Kipling, that Treasure Island has a realism as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood’s Village Tragedy may rank with Silas Marner, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding—­I do not dispute it.  I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all.  But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of the vast English-speaking and English-reading world.  And judging by that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known.  George Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.