They had wider travel, more extended occupations and interests, many other new things to draw upon.

And, lastly, they had some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion and impetus to novels of the specialist kind.

Nay, they had not only the great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to complete their education and the machinery of its development.
The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel.

Not that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss Austen's death.

But the external advantages just enumerated had failed it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the service of fiction generally.