ich could
be most suitably employed to depict it. Society had been presented on
the English stage by the authors of domestic comedies; Steele and
Addison had painted it in their essays. But in both forms the portrait
was incomplete. The exigencies of the stage, the necessary brevity of
the essay, made it impossible to give adequate expression to the
infinite complexity of the subject. The novel created anew by Defoe,
Fielding, and Richardson, made it an easy thing to introduce into the
arena of literature those men and women of intelligence and feeling who,
for long ages, had been pleased to see other people the chief subjects
of books and inwardly desired that authors should at last deal more
especially with themselves. The age of chivalry was gone; the time of
the Arthurs and the Tristans had passed away; such a society as the new
one could not so well be sung in verse; but it could extremely well be
described in prose.

As Fielding remarked, the novel takes the place of the old epic. We
think of the Harlowes when in the olden time we should have dreamed of
the Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth is
growing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian and
the art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highly
valued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted to
Tristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, and
we think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feeling
for the dead, for the dim past, for a race without posterity, for
childhood's cherished and fast-fading dreams. Thus in the same age when
Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones came to their kingdom, the poets
Chatterton, Percy, Beattie, and others, turned back lovingly to the
Middle Ages; and thus too the new taste for history, archaeology, and the
painting of real life, all put together and combined, ended by producing
a particular school of novel, the _romantic_ school, at whose head
stands Sir Walter Scott.

Perhaps, however, something besides poetry is to be sought for in these
bygone epochs. Movements of human thought have seldom that suddenness
with which they are sometimes credited; if those literary innovations,
apparently so spasmodic, are carefully and closely studied, it will be
nearly always found that the way had been imperceptibly prepared for
them through the ages. We are in the habit of beginning the history of
the English novel wit