is death. In the last ten years of his life, however,
imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great
numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very
good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general,
and upon two in particular--the _Brambletye House_ of Horace Smith, one
of the authors of the delightful parodies called _Rejected Addresses_,
and the first book, _Sir John Chiverton_, of an author who was to
continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very
great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also
began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James'
_Richelieu_, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as
_Sir John Chiverton_; but he was rather the older man of the two, having
been born in 1801, while Ainsworth's birth year was 1805. The latter,
too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of
English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were
exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as
the novels--_Darnley_, _Mary of Burgundy_, _Henry Masterton_, _John
Marston Hall_, and dozens of others--which made his fame; while
Ainsworth (_Jack Sheppard_, _The Tower of London_, _Crichton_,
_Rookwood_, _Old St. Paul's_, etc.) was a novelist only. Both,
especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with
the general public; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have
yet lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate
Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked very
high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ainsworth: his
historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he
was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his
situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the "two horsemen" who so
often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional
character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his
dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison
Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and keeping
the interest of those readers who read for mere excitement: he was
decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and other documents scraps of
decoration suitable for his purpose, he could in his better days string
incidents together with a very decided knack, an