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It would not be uninteresting, if we had space to do so here, to mark in detail the progress of this astonishing growth. It would be found that, in England at least, it has not been by any means regularly sustained. The original magnificent outburst of the English novel lasted for exactly a quarter of a century, and closed with the publication of Humphrey Clinker. During this period of excessive fertility in a field hitherto unworked, the novel produced one masterpiece after another, positively pushing itself to the front and securing the best attention of the public at a moment when such men as Gray, Butler, Hume, and Warburton were putting forth contributions to the old and long-established sections of literature. Nay: such was the force of the new kind of writing that the gravity of Johnson and the grace of Goldsmith were seduced into participating in its facile triumphs.

But, at the very moment when the novel seemed about to sweep everything before it, the wave subsided and almost disappeared. For nearly forty years, only one novel of the very highest class was produced in England; and it might well seem as though prose fiction, after its brief victory, had exhausted its resources, and had sunken for ever into obscurity. During the close of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, no novel, except Evelina, could pretend to disturb the laurels of Burke, of Gibbon, of Cowper, of Crabbe. The publication of Caleb Williams is a poor event to set against that of the Lyrical Ballads; even Thalaba the Destroyer seemed a more impressive phenomenon than the Monk. But the second great burgeoning of the novel was at hand. Like the tender ash, it delayed to clothe itself when all the woods of romanticism were green. But in 1811 came Sense and Sensibility, in 1814 Waverley; and the novel was once more at the head of the literary movement of the time.