significance.  New and attractive editions of her books are frequent:  she not only holds critical regard (and to criticism her importance is permanent) but is read by an appreciable number of the lovers of sound literature; read far more generally, we feel sure, than Disraeli or Bulwer or Charles Kingsley, who are so much nearer our own day and who filled so large a place in their respective times.  Compared with them, Jane Austen appears a serene classic.  When all is said, the test, the supreme test, is to be read:  that means that an author is vitally alive, not dead on the shelves of a library where he has been placed out of deference to the literary Mrs. Grundy.  Lessing felt this when he wrote his brilliant quatrain: 

Wer wird nicht einen Klopstock loben,
Doch wird ihn jeder lesen?  Nein! 
Wir wollen weniger erhoben
Und fleissiger gelesen sein,

So was the century which was to be conspicuous for its development of fiction that should portray the social relations of contemporary life with fine and ever-increasing truth, most happily inaugurated by a woman who founded its traditions and was a wonderful example of its method.  She is the literary godmother of Trollope and Howells, and of all other novelists since who prefer to the most spectacular uses of the imagination the unsensational chronicling of life.

CHAPTER VI

MODERN ROMANTICISM:  SCOTT

The year after the appearance of “Pride and Prejudice” there began to be published in England a series of anonymous historical stories to which the name of Waverley Novels came to be affixed, the title of the first volume.  It was not until the writer had produced for more than a decade a splendid list of fictions familiar to all lovers of literature, that his name—­by that time guessed by many and admitted to some—­was publicly announced as that of Walter Scott—­a man who, before he had printed a single romance, had won more than national importance by a succession of narrative poems beginning with “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

Few careers, personal and professional, in letters, are more stimulating and attractive than that of Scott.  His life was winsome, his work of that large and noble order that implies a worthy personality behind it.  Scott, the man, as he is portrayed in Lockhart’s Life and the ever-delightful Letters, is as suitable an object of admiration as Scott the author of “Guy Mannering” and “Old Mortality.”  And when we reflect that by the might of his genius he set his seal on the historical romance, that the modern romance derives from Scott, and that, moreover, in spite of the remarkable achievements in this order of fiction during almost a century, he remains not only its founder but its chief ornament, his contribution to modern fiction begins to be appreciated.