h in me some critics
have deplored, I might almost call Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.
There is the season, of little positive crop but important
seed-sowing,--the season in which the greater writers, Chateaubriand and
Mme. de Stael, perform their office. Here, too, quite humble
folk--Pigault-Lebrun completing what has been already dealt with,
Ducray-Duminil and others doing work to be dealt with here, and Paul de
Kock most of all, get the novel of ordinary life ready in various ways:
while others still, Nodier, Hugo, Vigny, Merimee, and, with however
different literary value, Arlincourt, implant the New Romance. There is
the sudden, magnificent, and long-continued outburst of all the kinds in
and after 1830. There is the autumn of the Second Empire, continuing and
adding to the fruits and flowers of summer: and there is the gradual
decadence of the last quarter of the century, with some late blossoming
and second-crop fruitage--the medlars of the novel--and the dying off of
the great producers of the past. But the breach of uniformity in formal
arrangement of the divisions would perhaps be too great to the eye
without being absolutely necessary to the sense, and I have endeavoured
to make the necessary recapitulation with a single "halt" of
chapter-length[5] at the exact middle. It will readily be understood
that the loss of my own library has been even more severely felt in this
volume than in the earlier one, while circumstances, public and private,
have made access to larger collections more difficult. But I have
endeavoured to "make good" as much as possible, and grumbling or
complaining supplies worse than no armour against Fate.

I have sometimes, perhaps rashly, during the writing of this book
wondered "What next"? By luck for myself--whether also for my readers it
would be ill even to wonder--I have been permitted to execute all the
literary schemes I ever formed, save two. The first of these (omitting a
work on "Transubstantiation" which I planned at the age of thirteen but
did not carry far) was a _History of the English Scholastics_, which I
thought of some ten years later, which was not unfavoured by good
authority, and which I should certainly have attempted, if other people
at Oxford in my time had not been so much cleverer than myself that I
could not get a fellowship. It has, strangely enough, never been done
yet by anybody; it would be a useful corrective to the exoteric chatter
which has sometime