suggestion from Vathek.  Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil for something like immortality and other privileges, including the unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain off his hands.  This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes:  and in one of these the love interest of the book—­the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora—­is related with some real pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and twaddle.  Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own generation very powerfully:  his influence being so great in France that Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are constant references to the book in the early French Romantics.  In fact for this kind of “sensation” Maturin is, putting Vathek aside, quite the chief of the whole school.  But it is doubtful whether he had many other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all without errors and extravagances.

The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had we space, would be worth dealing with at length—­as in the instances of the famous Sandford and Merton (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard Edgeworth’s friend, of Mrs. Trimmer’s Story of the Robins, and others.  It led up to the definitely religious school of children’s books, first evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later:  but was itself as a rule utilitarian—­or sentimental—­moral rather than directly religious.  It is, however, like other things—­indeed almost all things—­in this chapter—­a document of the fashion in which the novel was “filling all numbers” and being used for all purposes.  It was, of course, in this case, nearest to the world-old “fable”—­especially to the moral apologues of which the mediaeval sermon-writers and others had been so fond.  But its popularity, especially when taken in connection with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable.  It involves not merely the principle that “the devil shall not have all the best tunes,” but the admission that this tune is good.

This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader’s mind as the upshot of this chapter.  But there is a third, almost as important as either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete success—­the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the Jordan.  Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants, with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies,