e
work, "for four hundred copies only." The order for Part XV. had
risen to forty thousand. All contemporary accounts agree that the
success was sudden, immense. The author, like Lord Byron, some
twenty-five years before, "awoke and found himself famous." Young as
he was, not having yet numbered more than twenty-four summers, he at
one stride reached the topmost height of popularity. Everybody read
his book. Everybody laughed over it. Everybody talked about it.
Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but very surely, that a new and
vital force had arisen in English literature.

And English literature just then was in one of its times of slackness,
rather than full flow. The great tide of the beginning of the century
had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had scarcely begun to do more
than ripple and flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and Shelley and
Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; Southey's life was on the decline;
Wordsworth had long executed his best work; while of the coming men,
Carlyle, though in the plenitude of his power, having published
"Sartor Resartus," had not yet published his "French Revolution,"[11]
or delivered his lectures on the "Heroes," and was not yet in the
plenitude of his fame and influence; and Macaulay, then in India, was
known only as the essayist and politician; and Lord Tennyson and the
Brownings were more or less names of the future. Looking especially at
fiction, the time may be said to have been waiting for its
master-novelist. Five years had gone by since the good and great Sir
Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep,
as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved
so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one
shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer,
more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of
"Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" and Disraeli
had written "Vivian Grey," and his earlier books; while Thackeray,
Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, George Eliot were all, of course, to come
later. No, there was a vacant throne among the novelists. Here was the
hour--and here, too, was the man. In virtue of natural kingship he
took up his sceptre unquestioned.

Still, it may not be superfluous to inquire into the why and wherefore
of his success. All effects have a cause. What was the cause of this
special phenomenon? In the first place, the admirable fresh