inal Ippolito d'Este asked Ariosto a similar question, "Where they
got their stories from?" The feeling seems sometimes to have affected
poets, but much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and
confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination. Of the
unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices invented to answer this
inconvenient question Scott in one well-known passage,[51] and others
elsewhere, have made ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of
Miss Austen's satiric touches is the passage where Catherine Morland
expects palpitating interest from a bundle of washing-bills in a
wardrobe-cupboard. But the anticipation of such a question, though
perhaps it became conventional before it disappeared altogether, was
certainly at one time real.

At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson--Father of English
novels as he is with whatever justice called--and by that overmastering
fancy for letter-writing itself, which, as should have been already made
clear, affected the century in which English novels were born--the
practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was too perfect an artist
in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne
himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would
not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But
Smollett's best, _Humphrey Clinker_, adopts the method, and is perhaps
one of its most successful examples. It suited the author's preference
for a succession of scenes rather than a connected plot; for the sharp
presentation of "humours" in character and incident. And it continued to
be practised both early in the nineteenth century--examples had swarmed
at the end of the eighteenth--and later. _Redgauntlet_ (which some have
thought one of the best of Scott's novels and which few good judges
would put much lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not
wholly. And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters and
narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale. It is a sort
of confession of what certainly is the fact--that the novel entirely by
letters is a clumsy device, constantly getting in the way of the
"story." Indeed the method of _Redgauntlet_ is a kind of retreat to the
elder and more modern--one may say the more artistic and rational--plan
of _introducing_ letters, but only occasionally as auxiliaries to, and
as it were illustrations of, the actual narrative, not as substitutes
fo