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Besant does not see that the desire of the baker, the brewer, the butcher, and I may add the three-volume novelist, to be addressed by small tradesmen and lackeys as "yer lordship", raises a smile on the lips even of the most blase.

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.

But the troubles of this courtship had, like the wars of Augustus and Arabella in a three-volume novel, consumed so much time that there was none left for post-nuptial chronicles, and I was obliged to leave them with a neighborhood quarrel on hand which promised full employment for the head of the family while his little mate was sitting. O hark to the brown thrush! hear how he sings!

Ten thousand copies of a three-volume novel are certainly a ponderous cargo, and Constable printed no fewer in his first edition. Scott was assured of his own triumph in February 1819, when a dramatised version of his novel was acted in Edinburgh by the company of Mr. William Murray, a descendant of the traitor Murray of Broughton. Mr.

Nevertheless, this tale about a more amiable Charlotte than Werter's, so naturally also falling into the orthodox three-volume measure, is capable of being fabricated into something of deep, romantic, tragical interest; such a character, in such circumstances, in such an age, and such a place: I commend it to those of the Anglo-Gallic school, who love the domestically horrible, and delight in unsunned sorrows: but, I throw not any one topic away as a waif, for the casual passer-by to pick up on the highway.

Eventually the two former were accepted for a three-volume issue, though eighteen months passed and much happened before the book was actually circulated. Meantime, "The Professor" was plodding its way round London through many rejections.

At the same time, standard works of science and literature are being published in England at prices which tend steadily toward increased popular circulation. Even conservative publishers are reversing the rule of small editions at high prices, for larger editions at low prices. The old three-volume novel is nearly supplanted by the one volume, well-printed and bound book at five or six shillings.

But the actual popularity of "the old three-decker" continued for quite two generations, if not more, and was unmistakable. Library subscriptions were generally adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to more or fewer volumes than three would take the three-volume by preference.

The only difficulty was to get the male sex to follow out in practice what they so completely admired in Miss Bronté's three-volume novels. Unhappily, the male sex, being very imperfect and frail, could not be brought to do it.

I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat not possibly of literature but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax. In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird, above Pitlochry.