Except in the great eighteenth-century Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth later--it is simulated rather than actually brought about by the Terror-novel--except in the eternal exception of _Vathek_--for Maturin did not do his best work till much later.

The absence of it is mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may even be said that they don't know what they are doing.

In the worst examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as _A Peep at Our Ancestors_, this ignorance plumbs the abyss--blocks of dull serious narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible conversation, forming their staple.

Of the better class of books, from the _Female Quixote_ to _Discipline_, this cannot fairly be said: but there is always something wanting.

Frequently, as in both the books just mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.
Hardly ever is there a real _projection_ of character, in the round and living--only pale, sketchy "academies" that neither live, nor move, nor have any but a fitful and partial being.