One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned:  and it will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor novelists.  Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position, fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of more than middle age, published The Fool of Quality or The Adventures of Henry Earl of Morland.  The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and discursive as the other; the story is chaos:  the book is stuffed with disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems.  It is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with madness.  But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the unconquerable set of the time towards novel.

Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital contribution to English literature—­Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt to belittle Johnson:  and there is no doubt (for the Lives of the Poets is but a bundle of essays) that Rasselas is Johnson’s greatest book.  But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to “say not ditto to Mr. Burke” which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which are not quite of the greatest in literature. Rasselas is simply an extended and glorified moral apologue—­an enlarged “Vision of Mirza.”  It has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is “talking book;” it indulges in some but not much description.  It is in fact a prose Vanity of Human Wishes, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged in form, and as true to life as life itself.  You will have difficulty in finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining differentia.  Yet for our purposes Rasselas is almost as valuable as Tom Jones itself:  because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was the struggle towards production of this kind in prose.  The book is really—­to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding century—­Johnson al Mondo:  and at this time, when Johnson wanted to communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he chose the novel.