much-abused pens of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne himself; but it has
little purpose and indeed little vigour of any kind. Cumberland clung as
close as he could to the method of Fielding, including the preliminary
dissertation or meditation, but he would be a very strange reader who
should mistake the two.

The school of Bage and Cumberland, the former of whom bears some little
resemblance to his countrywoman George Eliot, was, with or without
Bage's purpose, continued more or less steadily; indeed, it may be said
to be little more than a variant, with local colour, of the ordinary
school of novel-writing. But it was not this school which was to give
tone to the period. The "tale of terror" had been started by Horace
Walpole in the _Castle of Otranto_, and had, as we have seen, received a
new and brilliant illustration in the hands of Beckford. But the genius
of the author of _Vathek_ could not be followed; the talent of the
author of the _Castle of Otranto_ was more easily imitated. How far the
practice of the Germans (who had themselves imitated Walpole, and whose
work began in the two last decades of the century to have a great reflex
influence upon England) was responsible for the style of story which,
after Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis had set the fashion, dominated the
circulating libraries for years, is a question not easy and perhaps not
necessary to answer positively. I believe myself that no foreign
influence ever causes a change in national taste; it merely coincides
therewith. But the fact of the set in the tide is unmistakable and
undeniable. For some years the two authors just mentioned rode paramount
in the affections of English novel readers; before long Miss Austen
devoted her early and delightful effort, _Northanger Abbey_, to
satirising the taste for them, and quoted or invented a well-known list
of blood-curdling titles;[2] the morbid talent of Maturin gave a fresh
impulse to it, even after the healthier genius of Scott had already
revolutionised the general scheme of novel-writing; and yet later still
an industrious literary hack, Leitch Ritchie, was able to issue, and it
may be presumed to find readers for, a variety of romance the titles of
which might strike a hasty practitioner of the kind of censure usual in
biblical criticism as a designed parody of Miss Austen's own catalogue.
The style, indeed, in the wide sense has never lost favour. But in the
special Radcliffian form it reigned for som