But Fielding's novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been able to walk.

And what we are looking for now is something rather different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the same or a similar kind.

In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel-_formula_: nobody had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas.

And nearly everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost incomprehensibly faulty.

Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were classable under the general head of inverisimilitude.