A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who have taken it as a special subject, is the “Tractarian” or High-Church novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had began, had no small share in popularising it.  The earlier Evangelicals had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views, especially among the young.  Mrs. Sherwood in Little Henry and his Bearer and The Fairchild Family (1818) and “Charlotte Elizabeth” (Browne or Tonna) are examples.  But the High-Church party, in accordance with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century, always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher standard of scholarship and of general literary culture.  Its early efforts in fiction—­according to the curious and most interesting law which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large—­were not strictly novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind.  In the late thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective.  The future bishop’s Agathos (before 1840) is a very spirited and well-written adaptation of the “whole armour of God” theme so often re-allegorised:  and Adams’s Shadow of the Cross is only the best of several good stories—­of a rather more feminine type, but graceful, sound enough in a general way, and combining the manners of Spenser and Bunyan with no despicable skill.  If, however, the Tractarian fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined religious instruction and pastime.  But they went much further afield.  Sometimes the excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing Owlet of Owlstone Edge and The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the bete noire of the early Anglo-Catholics.  William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the young.  But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior:  but undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style.  In her novels (Gertrude, Katharine Ashton, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of ordinary life.  Not that she eschews the higher middle or