of Whyte-Melville’s books, such as Market Harborough (1861), are hunting novels pure and simple, so much so that it has been said (rashly) that none but hunting men and women can read them.  Others, such as Kate Coventry (1856), a very lively and agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting.  Others, such as Holmby House (1860), The Queen’s Maries (1862), etc., attempt the historical style.  But perhaps this mixed novel of sport, society, and a good deal of love-making reached its most curious development in the novels of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once famous Guy Livingstone (1857) onwards—­a series almost typical, which was developed further, with touches of original but uncritical talent, which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late “Ouida” (Louise de La Ramee).  All the three last writers mentioned, however, especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel composition ("Ouida,” in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with larger parts of life.  The danger of the kind showed less in them than in some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers.  Some even of his books are quite interesting:  but in a few of them, and in more of other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten.  A run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the training and betting preliminary to them—­these form the real and almost the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy could make them up out of a number or two of the Field, a sufficient list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions.  This, in fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally:  though perhaps it does not show quite so glaringly in other cases.  Yet, even here, that note of the fiction of the whole century—­its tendency to “accaparate” and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of mankind—­shows itself notably enough.

So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set going hosts of imitations. Tom Brown’s School Days, for instance (1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad.  But there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not merely harp on one string.