People have almost left off shaking their heads over the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make out that it is decreasing.

It may be so; or it may not.

But what remains certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom "reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in "Romance" language.

We are less unsophisticated now: but there are certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to share that appellation with the newspaper.
Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did not come to anything like perfection for a very long time.

In a single example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost at once.