Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit, of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy.

Miss Austen's life was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but the greater part had.

Scott was in his actual hey-day.

Between them, they had dealt and were dealing--from curiously different sides and in as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature." Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly short of uncanny.

Before their time, despite the great examples of prose fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all.