and Mordaunt (1800).  Mackenzie did good work later in the periodical essay:  but his fiction is chiefly the “sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the absolutely absurd.  From his essay-work, and from Scott’s and other accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind:  but the extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself as substitute for his son.  This is one of the not rare, but certainly one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in total unconsciousness.  But it was the fashion:  and Mackenzie, though perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding, by “the fair” of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by “the brave.”

Moore saw a good deal of continental society—­he is indeed one of the first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution—­and he had a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed him. Zeluco chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army, pronounces white uniforms “absurd” and blue “only fit for the artillery and the blue horse.”  But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs. Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who was not to be very long after.  The later books are of much less importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which the French Revolution itself ushered.  But Moore, who was intimately connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest:  and is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.

He is a late instance—­he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years younger than Smollett himself—­of the writers who had, for all but half a century after Richardson’s appearance, accumulated patterns and examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers.  By these later years of the century the famous “Minerva Press” and many others issued deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.  “Absorbed” in more senses than one:  for the institution of circulating libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the destruction of the actual volumes read.  Novels were rarely produced in a very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in any way popular are now rather hard to obtain:  while even in the British Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are represented.  We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not quite at random, of