cases, of course, novels were not allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but few, they may have been sternly excluded.  On the other hand, the private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few exceptions, to rely on novels only—­“Mudie’s” and a few more being exceptions.  Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels; and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good copies.  The circulating library has survived both the decease of the three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library.  But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause—­and almost the whole sustaining cause—­of the three-volume system itself.  Nor was the connection between nature of form and system of distribution limited to England:  for the single-volume novel, though older in France than with us, is not so very old.

But a very considerable proportion of these famous books made appearances previous to that in three volumes, and not distantly connected with their popularity.  For the most part these previous appearances were either in magazines or periodicals of one kind and another, or else in “parts.”

Neither process was exactly new, though both were largely affected by changed conditions of general literature and life.  The magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost insensible gradations, to the original periodical-essay of the Steele-Addison type—­the small individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not itself on a very small scale.  If you run down the “Contents” of the British Essayists you will constantly find “Continuation of the story of Alonso and Imoinda” and the like.  But when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of newspapers and periodicals branched out into endless development, coincidently with the increase of demand and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable that this latter should be drawn upon to supply at once the standing dishes and the relishes of the entertainment. Blackwood and the London, the first fruits of the new kind, did not at once take to the novel by instalments:  and the London had no time to do so.  But Blackwood soon became celebrated—­a reputation which it has never lost—­for the excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long ones; while its followers—­Fraser, Bentley’s Miscellany, The Dublin University Magazine, the New Monthly, and others—­almost from the first bated their hooks with this new appat.  A very large proportion of the work of the novelists mentioned in the last chapter, as well as of Lever, appeared in one or other of these. Fraser in particular was Thackeray’s chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of the public as to his real powers and merits, while, just as he was going off, the very different work of Kingsley came on there.  And the tradition, as is well known, has never been broken.  The particular magazines may have died in some cases:  but the magazine-appearance of novels is nearly as vivacious as ever.