Indeed the memory of the aged and the industry of the young could recall or rediscover dozens and scores of noteworthy books, some of which have not lost actual or traditional reputation, such as the Paul Ferroll (1855) of Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of which is indicated in the title of its sequel, Why Paul Ferroll killed his Wife.  Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, and others began their careers at this time.  The best book ever written about school, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), and the best book in lighter vein ever written about Oxford, Mr. Verdant Green (1853-1856), both appeared in the fifties.

Although, indeed, the intenser and more individual genius of the great novelists of this time went rather higher than the specialist novel, it was, in certain directions, well cultivated during this period.  Men likely to write naval novels of merit were dying out, and though Lever took up the military tale, at second hand, with brilliant results, the same historical causes were in operation there.  But a comparatively new kind—­the “sporting” novel—­developed itself largely and in some cases went beyond mere sport.  Such early books as Egan’s Tom and Jerry (1821) can hardly be called novels:  but as the love of sport extended and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one side the pleasures of country squires, and on the other the amusements (sometimes rather blackguard in character) of men about town, the general subject made a lodgment in fiction.  One of its most characteristic practitioners was Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps acting as suggester of the original plan of Pickwick (not that which Dickens substituted), excogitated (between 1831 and 1838) the remarkable fictitious personage of “Mr. Jorrocks,” grocer and sportsman, whose adventures, and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same kind, he pursued through a number of books for some thirty years.  These (though in strict character, and in part of their manners, deficient as above noticed) were nearly always readable—­and sometimes very amusing—­even to those who are not exactly Nimrods:  and they were greatly commended to others still by the admirable illustrations of Leech.  There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and afterwards in Anthony Trollope:  while the novels of Frank Smedley, Frank Fairlegh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale’s Courtship (1855), mix a good deal more of it with some good fun and some rather rococo romance.  The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties, and entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively occupied, the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a Fifeshire gentleman, an Etonian, and a guardsman, who, after retiring from the army, served again in the Crimean War, and, after writing a large number of novels, was killed in the hunting field.  Some