even the higher classes:  though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper.  But the law of average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost invariably.  Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much the upper hand:  and though she wrote good English, possessed no special grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most harmless kind, and so forth.  The result is that her books have a certain dead-aliveness—­that the characters, though actually alive, are neither interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in their very uninterestingness.  Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition which the reader feels in the presence of actual mimesis—­of creation of fictitious fact and person.  But this is not common:  and the epithet “dull,” which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell.  A “success of esteem” is about the utmost that can be accorded her.

With Miss Yonge the case was very different.  She was a lady of wide reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell’s composition; she had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of human temperament.  She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had no command of the greater novelists’ imagination in the creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of what may be called the second or third class, in these respects.  She wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated herself.  And her best books—­the famous Heir of Redclyffe (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little “unco-guidness,” is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; Heartsease (1854), perhaps the best of all; Dynevor Terrace (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things; and the especially popular Daisy Chain (1856), with not a few others—­are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing) of reading.  Some of her early tales, before these, were a little “raw”:  and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope’s and that of other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been overcropped.  But she was hardly ever dull:  and she always had that quality—­if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman—­which prevents a thing from being a failure.  What is meant is done:  though perhaps it might have been meant higher.