many people if they were thus singly yoked to
history. It was once fashionable to dismiss _Peter_ as a boy's book,
because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on
Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a
sneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort of
fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her
appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do
not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not
exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is
sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known
story which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it is
clever enough--Charles Johnstone's _Chrysal_ or _The Adventures of a
Guinea_ (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than
one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous
(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other
scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it
_is_ clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a bad
taste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even in
clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,
excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature,"
and sometimes passed the border.

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, ea