haunted by the suggestion that George Eliot understood neither Italy nor the Italians.  It is this lack of harmony with Italian life itself which caused Morris and Rossetti and even Browning, with all his admiration for the author, to lay aside the book, unable to read it with pleasure or profit.  In a word, Romola is a great moral study and a very interesting book; but the characters are not Italian, and the novel as a whole lacks the strong reality which marks George Eliot’s English studies.

MINOR NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

In the three great novelists just considered we have an epitome of the fiction of the age, Dickens using the novel to solve social problems, Thackeray to paint the life of society as he saw it, and George Eliot to teach the fundamental principles of morality.  The influence of these three writers is reflected in all the minor novelists of the Victorian Age.  Thus, Dickens is reflected in Charles Reade, Thackeray in Anthony Trollope and the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot’s psychology finds artistic expression in George Meredith.  To these social and moral and realistic studies we should add the element of romance, from which few of our modern novelist’s can long escape.  The nineteenth century, which began with the romanticism of Walter Scott, returns to its first love, like a man glad to be home, in its delight over Blackmore’s Lorna Doone and the romances of Robert Louis Stevenson.

CHARLES READE.  In his fondness for stage effects, for picturing the romantic side of common life, and for using the novel as the instrument of social reform, there is a strong suggestion of Dickens in the work of Charles Reade (1814-1884).  Thus his Peg Woffington is a study of stage life from behind the scenes; A Terrible Temptation is a study of social reforms and reformers; and Put yourself in his Place is the picture of a workingman who struggles against the injustice of the trades unions.  His masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), one of our best historical novels, is a somewhat laborious study of student and vagabond life in Europe in the days of the German Renaissance.  It has small resemblance to George Eliot’s Romola, whose scene is laid in Italy during the same period; but the two works may well be read in succession, as the efforts of two very different novelists of the same period to restore the life of an age long past.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE.  In his realism, and especially in his conception of the novel as the entertainment of an idle hour, Trollope (1815-1882) is a reflection of Thackeray.  It would be hard to find a better duplicate of Becky Sharp, the heroine of Vanity Fair, for instance, than is found in Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of The Eustace Diamonds.  Trollope was the most industrious and systematic of modern novelists, writing a definite amount each day, and