And it is a simple historical fact, capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens (and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of its climax.
The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer of the drama may be too complimentary--I do not think it is, except in so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far than either drama itself or novel--but it is certainly not an altogether comfortable one.

For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen who discover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid.

And there are those who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising.

The student who is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness.

But he might admit--while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the dryest of dry bones--that circumstances are not incompatible with something like a decay in the novel: just as they were with a decay in the drama.