A History of English Literature

very influential expressions of his convictions--fervid arguments in the
form of fiction against existing social injustices. His most famous books
are 'Hypatia' (1853), a novel dealing with the Church in its conflict with
Greek philosophy in fifth-century Alexandria, and 'Westward Ho!' (1855)
which presents with sympathetic largeness of manner the adventurous side of
Elizabethan life. His brief 'Andromeda' is one of the best English poems
in the classical dactylic hexameter.
Charles Reade (1814-1884), a man of dramatic disposition somewhat similar
to that of Dickens (though Reade had a University education and was
admitted to the bar), divided his interest and fiery energies between the
drama and the novel. But while his plays were of such doubtful quality that
he generally had to pay for having them acted, his novels were often strong
and successful. Personally he was fervently evangelical, and like Dickens
he was often inspired to write by indignation at social wrongs. His 'Hard
Cash' (1863), which attacks private insane asylums, is powerful; but his
most important work is 'The Cloister and the Hearth' (1861), one of the
most informing and vivid of all historical novels, with the father of
Erasmus for its hero. No novelist can, be more thrilling and picturesque
than Reade, but he lacks restraint and is often highly sensational and
melodramatic.
Altogether different is the method of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) in his
fifty novels. Trollope, long a traveling employe in the post-office
service, was a man of very assertive and somewhat commonplace nature.
Partly a disciple of Thackeray, he went beyond Thackeray's example in the
refusal to take his art altogether seriously as an art; rather, he treated
it as a form of business, sneering at the idea of special inspiration, and
holding himself rigidly to a mechanical schedule of composition--a definite
and unvarying number of pages in a specified number of hours on each of his
working days. The result is not so disastrous as might have been expected;
his novels have no small degree of truth and interest. The most notable are
the half dozen which deal with ecclesiastical life in his imaginary county
of Barsetshire, beginning with 'The Warden' and 'Barchester Towers.' His
'Autobiography' furnishes in some of its chapters one of the noteworthy
existing discussions of the writer's art by a member of the profession.
Richard Blackmore (1825-1900), first a lawyer, later manager of a
market-garden, was the author of numerous novels, but will be remembered
only for 'Lorna Doone' (1869), a charming reproduction of Devonshire
country life assigned to the romantic setting of the time of James II. Its
simple-minded and gigantic hero John Ridd is certainly one of the permanent
figures of English fiction.
Joseph H. Shorthouse (1834-1903), a Birmingham chemical manufacturer, but a
man of very fine nature, is likewise to be mentioned for a single book,
'John Inglesant' (1881). Located in the middle of the seventeenth century,
when the strife of religious and political parties afforded material
especially available for the author's purpose, this is a spiritual romance,
a High Churchman's assertion of the supremacy of the inner over the outer
life. From this point of view it is one of the most significant of English
novels, and though much of it is philosophical and though it is not free
from technical faults, parts of it attain the extreme limit of absorbing
narrative interest.
Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford Fellow, also represents distinctly the
spirit of unworldliness, which in his case led to a personal aloofness from
active life. He was the master of a delicately-finished, somewhat
over-fastidious, style, which he employed in essays on the Renaissance and