devoid of the delicate spring and “give” which irony requires, and which constitutes the triumph even of such things as A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild.  The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house) to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story.  He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great bore—­as, indeed, to me is the whole book.  The earlier Man as He is is far better.  The hero, Sir George Paradyne, though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself:  while the heroine—­a certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant’s daughter under a double cloud of her father’s misfortune and of calumny as regards herself—­though not an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen Charlottes thrown in to make “25 as 24” in bookseller’s phrase.  Bage’s extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young gentleman sitting on his wife’s lap, with her arms round him, while he is literally and en tout bien tout honneur painting her face—­being a great artist in that way. Mount Henneth is perhaps the liveliest of all:  though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant unconventionalities than this.  But as a matter of fact Bage never entirely “comes off”:  though there is cleverness enough in him to have made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time for the novel.  For he was essentially a novelist of manners and character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out of one stage and had not settled into another.  Even Miss Edgeworth in Belinda shows the disadvantage of this:  and she was a lady of genius, while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.

Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had applied it to him:  for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his education as a stable boy.  He was, however, a man of considerable intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed itself in his dramas (the best known, The Road to Ruin), but is not quite absent from his novels Alwyn (1780), Anna St. Ives (1792), and Hugh Trevor (1794-1797).  The series runs in curious parallel to that of Bage’s work:  for Alwyn, the liveliest and the earliest by far of the three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but more after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in.  The other two are purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the