he half-saved. I give him better place. But James, despite Smedley's praise, I am afraid we must leave here, with all his mass of output-well, I think, over a undred long tales in all. Doubtless he followed the Wizard faithfully; but doubtless, too, he followed afar bff. Were it humanly speaking possible to wade hrough that sea of script which G. P. R. James's pen produced so very currently, we should hardly, I think, if we emerged with life on the far shore, have discovered one at all novel in ingenious plot, one episode that made the pulse go faster, one character with a vital soul. If, as is natural, such words as these should send a reader to James, seeking to contradict them, I would counsel him to try Henry Masterton.' I believe it to be James's best, and am willing to accept it as the test of his worth. I fear, however, that the two cavaliers will never come riding forth again through the Limbo gates. They have their lodging and their stabling as a freehold. And may they rest them well, for they gave us, difficult though we now find it to understand why, entertainment of a quality that we did not question and in a quantity impossible to exhaust in those long-ago days when we ourselves must have been so interestingly different.

What we chiefly miss in these Victorians, taken in bulk, is a certain quality which I may perhaps best call subtlety. They have none of it: they go, in simple fashion, straight at their job: they tell their tale and do not pay much thought to the literary manner of its telling to its style. So far, indeed, they follow the great exemplar, for the most fervent lover of Sir Walter will not claim him as a stylist. That factor of storytelling he neglected; but to two even more essential factors it is impossible to doubt that he gave much thought-to his plot and to his characters. If you say 'character-creator' to an Anglo-Saxon, whom does his thought go out to first? Shakespeare, undoubtedly. Then, secondly, I think his thought will go to Scott. The most pious followers curiously failed here. In the plots, on the whole, considering their handicap-for Scott had an advantage there, in the Border and Highland stories with which his mind was so stocked-they were admirably ingenious. Each plot, moreover, as it is used, takes something from the total ore in the

mine that story-tellers work. The vein is not inex haustible.

But in character-drawing most of these Victorians lag so far behind the master that they scarcely seem to realise what it means-for how much it counts; and that, mainly, far more than a lack of style, is, I think, the reason why they have no abiding life in the minds of readers-why thus they lie in Limbo. And humour? On the whole they do not conspicuously lack for humour. I have written that Smedley abounds in it. He does, but it is of necessity the humour of his time, and humour is a quality that 'dates.' Wit is of its own time also, though less definitely so. Dickens, almost beyond question, brings the humour of that date to its highest, as Thackeray does its wit. Scott is infinitely humorous on occasion, and, comparing him in this regard with Dickens, we might say that whereas Dickens is essentially humorous and incidentally human, Scott is essentially human and incidentally humorous: which is as much as to say that the one gives us humanity and the other its caricature.

And now, of course, if he have endured so far, my reader who is native of our latest Free State will be raging furiously: Humour of the Victorian era, and not a word of Ireland! By Lever and by Lover, yet another deadly insult!' Yes, I know-they should not be overlooked. " Handy Andy' and 'Rory O'More'what sounding titles!—are remembered. Remembered as titles-who, indeed, could quite lose their jingle out of their ears-but do we remember the tales ? There is the gallant old lady, slightly eccentric, who always wore a chimney cowl, with a weather-cock on top, by way of head-gear. That is a picture out of Lover which does not fade. But Lever's name calls up the echoes far more clearly. Though his fun rollicks unceasingly, still it was with something of a Scott-like fervour and industry that he set himself to study the scenes for his 'Charles O'Malley,' in the Peninsular War, and for his 'Tom Burke of "Ours" in other anti-Napoleonic campaigns. He has, moreover, a clean if not a brightly polished style, and, exceptionally among the half-saved, a keen eye for character. His failure to win place with the immortals is, I think, due to his also rather

exceptional indifference to plot. He gives us a succession of episodes, rather than a story. Almost more than most of the Victorians he is prone to their often besetting sin of telling by the way anecdotes that do not advance the main narrative and only vex us by the delay. The by-the-way stories in Charles O'Malley,' however, are so full of Irish drollery that we can hardly wish them away. Still, they might just as well be packed together in one volume and sold separately-they would make a book half as long as the original three-decker'-and the main story might be equally well contained in another volume and sold like a modern novel at seven-and-sixpence. I believe that thus to edit it and so to publish it would be the most popular possible way of its rescue from Limbo. I know I run the risk of challenge to a duel, after the fashion of Lever's own heroes, for the insult which the very suggestion of so mangling him conveys. But I will risk that. My skin is safe, for I am much 'too proud to fight,' and I do not mind about my honour. I will make amends by saying that even without this anatomising I deem both 'Charles O'Malley' and 'Tom Burke' worth salvage. Lever was a vivid imaginer and describer. He never was in the Peninsula, nor was he a soldier; yet men who were both testified to the living truth of the scenes that Charles O'Malley fought through, and Lever's description of Waterloo has gained high marks for its accuracy. For the purposes

of Tom Burke' he visited the chief battlefields on the Continent and sought first-hand witnesses. Moreover, Burke has cured himself of the worst of that vexatious if amusing habit of Charles O'Malley to buttonhole us while he tells little stories by the way, instead of letting us get on with the big story. I would pick Tom out of the Limbo even before Charles.

Of course, there were others after these two first favourites-as 'The Knight of Gwynne,' 'The Dodd Family Abroad,' 'Davenport Dunn,' and so on. They all show Lever's aptness in character-drawing-rare enough among his contemporaries. Has not Mickey Free, indeed, with no too exuberant fancy, been styled 'the Irish Sam Weller'? But these later people have not quite the same vivacity, not quite so much of that 'come-along-and-have-a-good-laugh-with-me' allurement

which engage us to follow Tom and Charles and also Harry Lorrequer who was born before either of them. And, allowing for the necessary fact that we are in the time and the company of the three or four bottle men, we are always in what the Victorians called a healthy atmosphere. It was the only atmosphere that an author of the time could live in, though Ouida sometimes affronted it and survived.

I doubt whether we can profitably salvage Lover, because almost all that he has to give us is given better by Lever. Lever is everywhere stronger: he makes his characters live and move faster, and takes us with him at better speed; his descriptions are more vivid, his punch is stronger, and his heroes drink more of it. Lover-I hope I am not unjust-seems something like the moon to Lever's sun. Lever and Charles O'Malley' call to mind another who set his principal scene in the Peninsula-James Grant, with his Romance of War.' James Grant himself was a soldier, and if it were a precise picture of the military life of the time that we were seeking, I would not say but that we might find it better drawn in the pages of Grant than of Lever; for Grant does his work like a competent conscientious craftsman. (Is that a damning of the poor fellow fathoms deep under faint praise? It is not meant so.) But if, on the other hand, it is the fun of the fair that we are out for, then by all means let us take Lever, rather than Grant, as our guide. For Lever hustles us along, laughing the while, with just a tear here and there, by the way: Grant is a conductor of graver pace and of more serious countenance. That is almost to say that the one writes Hibernicè, the other Scoticè. It is, moreover, with Irish regiments that we go campaigning under Lever; with Scottish under Grant. If it were not for Lever, I would say to any who wished to see British military life in the Napoleonic wars, Try Grant'; but since there is, happily, a Lever, with a 'go' and a sense of fun that are to seek in Grant, I would say, 'Take your gay Irishman, with his good entertainment, first, and the solid Scot later if you are still hungry for more.'

It was easy, as it would appear, to follow Sir Walterat a distance-along the broad highways of historical romance: fatally easy to be misled by Thackeray into

those tedious moralisings which becloud even his vivid he page. It seems as if the third of the great triumvirate of the early 19th century was the least imitable. Samuel Warren, almost his contemporary, was surely the most faithful to Dickens and the most successful of those who tried his manner. Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse, certainly not the hero of Warren's 'Ten Thousand a Year,' quite as certainly not its villain, for he lacked intelligence for villainy, and yet indubitably its principal figure, is something very like a masterpiece. He is so unspeakably abominable, so finally devoid of any saving grace, that he is quite pathetic. It is the highest witness to his creator's genius that he convinces us that even to be so abominable as Titmouse is in itself pathetic, establishes a claim on our pity. As for the good man Mr Aubrey, whom the machinations of Messrs Quirk, Gammon and Snap, solicitors, for some two years oust from his legal rights and estate in Mr Titmouse's favour, we all know that the spectacle of a good and brave man struggling with adversity is one of the most uplifting which humanity affords, but it is possible to grow a little weary of too long an uplift, and I am not sure but what we are likely to feel some fatigue here. If Ten Thousand a Year' is very (once) good, it is very, very (at least twice) long. Nevertheless, its plot, most intricate and most interesting, never halts, for all its length, and in every single page on which the unspeakable Titmouse appears it grips you, it infuriates you, and it entertains you. Warren's humour is Dickensian in its kind-Titmouse is a very degraded Dick Swiveller: Dick Swiveller is both an aristocrat and a Nature's gentleman in the comparison-though not in its degree. But Warren does not fall into the occasional bathos of his master. Though he discourses at rather weary length over Aubrey and his nobility in his fall, he does not unduly sentimentalise. Warren was a barrister, and this, his chief and monumentally long book, is engaging largely because of the extraordinary subtleties of legal action, legal villainy, and legal uncertainty that it discloses. We are 'kept guessing' all the time.

Better late perhaps than never, my conscience tells me that I have been most ungallant to the ladies. Whom of them have I so much as mentioned? Ouida-no more.