ssayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely
(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at
all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style
was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies
to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the _Vicar_ has
more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the
work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities
of the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,
for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of
course--the "Fudge!" scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies may
be taken as the first example that occurs--_is_ drama, with all the
cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One may
almost see that "notice to quit," which (some will have it) has been,
after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,
served by the _Vicar of Wakefield_ on the drama.

At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any other
book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which
we have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even to
a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its
proper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmly
therein. Either it has some _arriere pensee_, some second purpose,
besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic
re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,
it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such
an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in
"revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinary
course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical
disquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other of
the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want
to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply
does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_
from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its
middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of
novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no
means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.
But while the kind had not co