He modernised and multiplied its subjects, attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist and _colporteur_.

He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all) banished from that novel the tendency to conventional "lingo" which, though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had existed.

It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure pronounced a little above--that both cannot be true.

But both are true: and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a really good tale ("Gervase Skinner" is probably the best), and yet that he deserves the place here given to him.
Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth) very late, began pretty early.

Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, _Sir John Chiverton_, was with Horace Smith's _Brambletye House_ (1826), the actual subject of Scott's criticism above quoted.