not seem so
to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,
written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of
the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which
constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and
_Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not
really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)
to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind
of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these
novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The
earlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,
though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being
sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a
certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud
of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though not
an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen
Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's
extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an
odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly
enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young
gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he
is literally and _en tout bien tout honneur_ painting her face--being a
great artist in that way. _Mount Henneth_ is perhaps the liveliest of
all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant
unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never
entirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to have
made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time
for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and
character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out
of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in
_Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,
while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.

Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the
title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had
applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in
his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his
education a