of America.
Lawrence, who was born in 1827, published in his thirtieth year a
novel, _Guy Livingstone_, which was very popular, and much denounced as
the Gospel of "muscular blackguardism"--a parody on the phrase "muscular
Christianity," which had been applied to and not unwelcomed by Charles
Kingsley. The book exhibited a very curious blend of divers of the
motives and interests which have been specified as actuating the novel
about this time. Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full
the Prae-Raphaelite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and
wrote in a style which is a sort of transition between the excessive
floridness of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr.
Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new modelled, the
tendency to take "society" and the manners, especially the amatory
manners, of society very much as his province. And thus he rather
shocked the moralists, not only in _Guy Livingstone_ itself, but in its
successors _Sword and Gown_, _Barren Honour_, _Sans Merci_, etc. That
Lawrence's total ideal, both in style and sentiment, was artificial,
false, and flawed, may be admitted. But he has to a great extent been
made to bear the blame of exaggerations of his own scheme by others; and
he was really a novelist and a writer of great talent, which somehow
came short, but not so very far short, of genius.

Mrs. Gaskell was older than most of those hitherto mentioned in this
chapter, having been born in 1810; but she did not begin to write very
early. _Mary Barton_, her first and nearly her best book, appeared in
1848, and its vivid picture of Manchester life, assisted by its great
pathos, naturally attracted attention at that particular time.
_Cranford_ (1853), in a very different style, something like a blend of
Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, has been the most permanently popular of
her works. _Ruth_, of the same year, shocked precisians (which it need
not have done), but is of much less literary value than _Mary Barton_ or
_Cranford_. Mrs. Gaskell, who was the biographer of Charlotte Bronte,
produced novels regularly till her death in 1865, and never wrote
anything bad, though it may be doubted whether anything but _Cranford_
will retain permanent rank.

The year 1857, which saw _Guy Livingstone_, saw a book as different as
possible in ideal, but also one of no common merit, in _John Halifax,
Gentleman_. The author of this was Dinah Maria Mulock, who a