ust be visionary and diaphanous, or he is no
Coridon for me. Remove my night-gloves, and assist me to rise: it is
past four o'clock, and the sun must have, by this time, sufficiently
aired this terrestrial globe.'"

_A_. I have it now; I feel I could go on for an hour.

_B_. Longer than that, before you get him out of his dressing-room.
You must make at least five chapters before he is apparelled, or how can
you write a fashionable novel, in which you cannot afford more than two
incidents in the three volumes? Two are absolutely necessary for the
editor of the Gazette to extract as specimens, before he winds up an
eulogy. Do you think that you can proceed now for a week, without my
assistance?

_A_. I think so, if you will first give me some general ideas. In the
first place, am I always to continue in this style?

_B_. No; I thought you knew better. You must throw in patches of
philosophy every now and then.

_A_. Philosophy in a fashionable novel?

_B_. Most assuredly, or it would be complained of as trifling; but a
piece, now and then, of philosophy, as unintelligible as possible,
stamps it with deep thought. In the dressing-room, or boudoir, it must
be occasionally Epicurean; elsewhere, especially in the open air, more
Stoical.

_A_. I'm afraid that I shall not manage that without a specimen to copy
from. Now I think of it, Eugene Aram says something very beautiful on a
starry night.

_B_. He does: it is one of the most splendid pieces of writing in our
language. But I will have no profanation, Arthur;--to your pen again,
and write. We'll suppose our hero to have retired from the crowded
festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to
have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London
fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself on a tombstone.
"Ye dead!" exclaims the hero, "where are ye? Do your disembodied
spirits now float around me, and, shrouded in this horrible veil of
nature, glare unseen upon vitality? Float ye upon this intolerable
mist, in yourselves still more misty and intolerable? Hold ye high
jubilee to-night? or do ye crouch behind these monitorial stones,
gibbering and chattering at one who dares thus to invade your precincts?
Here may I hold communion with my soul, and, in the invisible presence
of those who could, but dare not to reveal. Away! it must not be."

_A_. What mustn't be?

_B_. That is the mystery wh