Fisher's 'Scrap-Book,' and numerous other artistically got up volumes full of excerpts and elegant extracts, illustrated by some of the first engravers of the time, were extremely fashionable in those days, and for light and casual reading very probably supplied all that was necessary. The poets, from the Earl of Surrey onward, were served up in dainty plats, and the best prose authors were disembowelled with remarkable skill. The ingenious Martin Tupper, observing this transformation scene, brought joy into many households by laying down, in the form of explicit statements, matters of theological controversy which had in their day fed the Smithfield fires till they roared and blazed like those of Moloch.
These books were for the cultured, to whom the random books of Pierce Egan and William Combe were positively distasteful, and who, having neither the time nor the inclination to bury themselves deeply in classic lore, eagerly welcomed anything which appealed to their better selves and, at the same time, did not too severely tax their brains. The very style and nature of the books which were published at this period show as conclusively as anything can do the great change which was gradually creeping over the public mind.
Smollett and Swift were becoming coarse, and Hogarth, in his realm of art, was already much worse. Mrs. Radcliffe and the Rev. Mr. Maturin stalked like a couple of terrifying ghosts hung about with chains, wailing their lost home. They invariably spoke of haunted caverns, and the wind rumbling itself to sleep in the recesses of ruined chimneys. Their novels were the delight of these same dry-as-dusts, to whom the new age had said farewell, but who, in their impenetrable fastnesses, still revelled, though in numbers yearly decreasing, in 'The Raven,' with its soul-quaking refrain, in the 'Castle of Otranto,' and 'The Bravo of Venice.' Things of graver mood they could not find had they searched the entire catalogue of English literature, from the metrical poems of Cædmon, chanted to the winds of Whitby, down to the newest poem or novel.
The new school called the old 'unhealthy,' that being a not inapt adjective with which to express the absence of brightness and chic, qualities which came, as everything else comes, when called for, and which were embodied to a nicety in 'Sketches by "Boz,"' 'The Pickwick Papers,' and later on in 'The Yellowplush Correspondence,' and 'The Paris Sketch-Book.' The new poetry was represented by Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and many more, and essays of better, or, at any rate, more taking, style than those of the Rev. Vicessimus Knox, were published every day, and what is more to the point, extensively read and hoarded.