that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that
Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the
imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the
Antiquary. _Oliver Twist_, the _Last Days of Pompeii_, _Vanity Fair_,
_Jane Eyre_, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last
Chronicle of _Barset_, _Lothair_, and _Silas Marner_ as fresh as they
were a quarter of a century ago.

We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about
to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If
any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in
the entire _Barsetshire_ series, that Dickens could not have bettered
the _Two Drummer Boys_ of Rudyard Kipling, that _Treasure Island_ has a
realism as vivid as _Robinson Crusoe_, that Mrs. Wood's _Village
Tragedy_ may rank with _Silas Marner_, that Howells and Besant, Ouida
and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading
as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of
Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which
reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding--I do not dispute it.
I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all.
But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of
the vast English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by
that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living
romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and
welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George
Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for
twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be
counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.

We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole