Publication in parts is nearly as old, but has a less continuous history, and has seen itself suffer an interruption of life.  There are scattered examples of it pretty far back both in France and England.  Marivaux had a particular fancy for it:  with the result that he left not a little of his work unfinished.  Such volume-publication as that of Tristram Shandy, in batches really small in quantity and at fairly regular if long intervals, is not much different from part-issue.  As the taste for reading spread to classes with not much ready money, and perhaps, in some cases, living at a distance from libraries, this taste spread too.  But I do not think there can be much doubt that the immense success of Dickens—­in combination with his own very distinct predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor—­had most to do with its prevalence during the period under present consideration.  Thackeray took up the practice from him:  as well as others both from him and from Thackeray.  The great illustrators, too, of the forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to make it popular.  But the circulating libraries did not like it for obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial:  and the great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill, cut the ground from under its feet.  The last remarkable novel that I remember seeing in the form was The Last Chronicle of Barset.  Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda came out in parts which were rather volumes than parts.

This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be without some effects on the character of the production.  These were neither wholly good nor wholly bad.  They served to some extent to correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to “go to seed” in the middle—­to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread between.  For readers would not have stood this in instalments:  you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each—­if possible—­indeed to leave each off at an interesting point.  But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole—­to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope:  and there was worse temptation behind.  If a man had the opportunity, the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done.  But perhaps there is no class of people with whom the temptation—­common enough in every class—­of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters.  It is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane man, especially when he