And they are present by dozens and scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of inset verse--sometimes serious, more often light--of which Peacock, again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of prose.
Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these "eccentrics" are of very great importance in the history of the English novel.

The danger of the kind--even more than of other literary kinds--lies in the direction of mould and mechanism--of the production, by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character.

This danger has been and is being amply exemplified.

But the Peacocks (would the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by the fact that even the best in this kind is "caviare to the general," while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the general or the elect.

They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast, in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.
Besides these individual names--which in most literatures would be great, and even in English literature are not small--the second quarter of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective system.