Those merits, indeed, are absolutely incontestable.

His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance.

But he does not need it.
For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than had ever been known before.

The dithyrambs of Diderot are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an exaggeration of the truth.

On the comic side he was weak: and he made a most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar.