the language of Addison and Steele".
And there will be the possibly less ingenuous but more obtrusive
malcontent who will say that it ought never to have been done, or that it
is not, as it is, done well. With the first, who probably exists "in
squadrons and gross bands", argument is, of course, impossible. He may be
taught better if he is caught young, but that is all: and certainly the
last thing that any honest lover of literature would wish would be to make
him say that he likes a thing when he does not. That may be left to those
who preach and follow the fashions of the moment. Nor, perhaps, is there
very much to do with those who say that the double attempt is not
successful--except to disable their judgement. But as for the doctrine that
this attempt _deserves_ to fail, and must fail--that it is wrong in
itself--there one may take up the cudgels with some confidence.

So far from there being anything illegitimate in this attempt to bring one
period before the eyes of another in its habit as it lived, and speaking
as it spoke, but to allow those eyes themselves to move as they move and
see as they see--it is merely the triumph and the justification of the
whole method of prose fiction in general, and of the historical novel in
particular. For that historical novel is itself the result of the growth
of the historic sense acting upon the demand for fiction. So long as
people made no attempt to understand things and thoughts different from
those around and within them; so long as, like the men of the Middle Ages,
they blandly threw everything into their own image, or, like those of the
Renaissance to some extent and the Augustan period still more, regarded
other ages at worst with contempt, and at best with indulgence as
childish--the historical novel could not come into being, and did not. It
only became possible when history began to be seriously studied as
something more than a chronicle of external events. When it had thus been
made possible, it was a perfectly legitimate experiment to carry the
process still further; not merely to discuss or moralize, but to represent
the period as it was, without forfeiting the privilege of regarding it
from a point of view which it had not itself reached. The process of
Thackeray is really only an unfolding, and carrying further into
application, of the method of Shakespeare. Partly his date, partly his
genius, partly his dramatic necessities, obliged Shakespeare to combine
his