ir own
manners, conduct, morals or sympathies. Indeed, some of them are so
confident of the unreality of novels that when they are confronted
with their own counterparts in fictitious personality they feel a
certain sense of humiliation as of being convicted of eccentricity, of
an unlikeness to actual persons, which must be concealed as branding
them "fit to be put into a novel." To such persons novel-reading is a
vice, because it is an indolent excitement, a mental opium-eating; the
useless butting--against an unscalable wall--of brains intended to be
fully occupied in developing those parts of the nervous and muscular
systems that find their highest application in vigorous devotion to
the washboard or the laying of gas pipes down.

What a different result is achieved by the reader who knows the secret
that imagination is the soul of thought, that taste is the power of
truth and that the abstractions produced by imagination and taste
dealing with fact to convert it to fiction, or carefully assembling
fiction to convert it to fact, have been the stars that have lighted
up the night of human history. By the light of these in their varying
forms man discovered Religion, Philosophy, Science, Government and the
possibility of orderly Liberty. To such a reader the novel comprehends
all human society, its customs and secrets. The untraveled man may sit
in his library and become as familiar with the world as with his
native town; the diffident student may mingle familiarly in the
society of courts; the bashful girl may learn the most engaging
manners; the slow may learn the trick of wit; the rich may learn
sympathy for the poor; the weak may be warned against the pitfalls of
temptation and every one may there survey himself in every aspect,
subjected to discussion and exhibition under various disguises and
under various circumstances; and, if he have courage and the desire,
he can decide what he thinks of himself and the possibilities of
improving the opinion in the light of full knowledge of the subject.

The Novel has come as the solvent of all literary art. In its
possibilities all the essentials of other literary forms are
combined and conveyed without injury. Professedly not History, it
performs all its wonders in the guise of History and adds a light and
a human interest to chronicle that gives increased value. We do not
get sympathetic and human knowledge of England from History, but from
Scott, Thackeray and her sple