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It cannot be said to have stayed there very long. Miss Austen's brief and brilliant career closed in 1817. Sir Walter Scott continued to be not far below his best until about ten years later. But a period of two decades included not only the work of these two great novelists, but the best books also of Galt, of Mary Ferrier, of Maturin, of Lockhart, of Banim. It saw the publication of Hajji Baba, of Frankenstein, of Anastatius. Then, for the second time, prose fiction ceased for a while to hold a position of high predominance. But Bulwer Lytton was already at hand; and five or six years of comparative obscurity prepared the way for Dickens, Lever, and Lover. Since the memorable year 1837 the novel has reigned in English literature; and its tyranny was never more irresistible than it is to-day. The Victorian has been peculiarly the age of the triumph of fiction.

In the history of France something of the same fluctuation might be perceived, although the production of novels of a certain literary pretension has been a feature of French much longer and more steadily than of English life. As Mr. Saintsbury has pointed out, "it is particularly noteworthy that every one of the eight names which have been set at the head" of the nineteenth-century literature of France "is the name of a novelist." Since the days of Flaubert—for the last thirty years, that is to say—the novel has assumed a still higher literary function than it held even in the hands of George Sand and Balzac. It has cast aside the pretence of merely amusing, and has affected the airs of guide, philosopher, and friend. M. Zola, justified to some extent by the amazing vogue of his own writings, and the vast area covered by their prestige, has said that the various classes of literary production are being merged in the novel, and are ultimately to disappear within it: