These were neither wholly good nor wholly bad.

They served to some extent to correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to "go to seed" in the middle--to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread between.

For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each--if possible--indeed to leave each off at an interesting point.

But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole--to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope: and there was worse temptation behind.

If a man had the opportunity, the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done.