uld have had a chance of delivering his
opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread
and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have
been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.

[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a
good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy
Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the
earlier novelist fails.

All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her
generous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, and
more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the
view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself
possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not
very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost
grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the
trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss
Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of
extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that
occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the
very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There
was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a
profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human
race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,
and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious
coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same
time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of
the novel proper.

This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before
Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people
know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be
certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was
writing, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764). His own references to his
own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it
safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external
evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface to
the second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success of
the first _before_ this preface makes double salting advisable-