had passed.  Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor’s wife a vulgarised and repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a dissenting Adams—­the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter perhaps did not feel.  There are some good things in the story, but, as a whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger of modern literature—­the influence of the “printed book” itself:  and in a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public favour which we are chronicling.  If the kind had not been popular, and if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that Henry would never have existed.  The causes are important:  the effect not quite so.

There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time, whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad.  This may be called the “revolutionary school,” and its three most distinguished scholars were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.  The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French Revolution and shows the influence of its causes:  the others were directly influenced by itself.

One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage.  It was unfortunate for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in full.  Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost more French than English.  He has been put in the school of Richardson, but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the supposed scholar:  and it is not certain that Bage would or need have felt complimented by the assignment of the master.  He has the special laxity of the time in point of “morality,” or at least of decency; its affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting.  Bage is good-tempered enough as it is:  but he rather suggests possible Carrier-and-Fouche developments in a favourable and fostering atmosphere.  One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne Novels three of Bage’s, Mount Henneth (1781), Barham Downs (1784), and James Wallace (1788), did not also include, if not The Fair Syrian (1787), two others, Man as He is (1792) and the still later Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not (1796).  This last has sometimes been regarded as Bage’s masterpiece:  but it does not seem so to the present writer.  It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child, written in Bage’s worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely