should not be read in the morning.”  A test which may be thought vulgar by the super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered status and position of the writers of novels.  In the eighteenth, especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely been looked down upon as a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to novel-writing under some stress of circumstance.  Even when he was by birth a “gentleman of coat armour” as Fielding and Smollett were, he was usually a gentleman very much out at elbows:  the stories, true or false, of Rasselas and Johnson’s mother’s funeral expenses, of the Vicar of Wakefield and Goldsmith’s dunning landlady, have something more than mere anecdote in them.  Mackenzie, though the paternity of his famille deplorable of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal incognito.  Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at their disposal, were allowed more latitude:  and this really perhaps had something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is certain that Scott’s rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent commercial speculation.  Yet he, who altered so much in the novel, altered this also.  Of the novelists noticed in the early part of this chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and Companion of the Bath.

And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader.  This latter was to continue unabated:  whether the former was to increase, to maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of opinion.  But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel rose to its actual zenith.  Nearly all the writers mentioned in this chapter continued to write—­the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray’s accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens’s, had still to appear.  But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits, some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest:  and a distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be seen.  In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last to be brought to bear with astonishing results:  while, partly owing to the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing.  More than ever we shall have to let styles and kinds