But these twenty years were years of extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself.

There was, indeed, ample room for both.

You cannot kill Romance: it would be a profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human race, if you could.

But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind, and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of the novel proper.
This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people know in what and by whom.

To this day it is by no means easy to be certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was writing, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764).