It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of the _agremens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not appeal to us.

To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or the _Fool of Quality_.

But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind.

The first plot of Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance.

Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and more than one of them has taken up something like it.