rld, as the best instructors and the
best examples can rarely produce without the aid of more mature age and
longer experience.--On the other hand, a fiction is still _improbable_,
though _not unnatural_, when there is no reason to be assigned why
things should not take place as represented, except that the
_overbalance of chances is_ against it; the hero meets, in his utmost
distress, most opportunely, with the very person to whom he had formerly
done a signal service, and who happens to communicate to him a piece of
intelligence which sets all to rights. Why should he not meet him as
well as any one else? all that can be said is, that there is no reason
why he should. The infant who is saved from a wreck, and who afterwards
becomes such a constellation of virtues and accomplishments, turns out
to be no other than the nephew of the very gentleman, on whose estate
the waves had cast him, and whose lovely daughter he had so long sighed
for in vain: there is no reason to be given, except from the calculation
of chances, why he should not have been thrown on one part of the coast
as well as another. Nay, it would be nothing unnatural, though the most
determined novel-reader would be shocked at its improbability, if all
the hero's enemies, while they were conspiring his ruin were to be
struck dead together by a lucky flash of lightning: yet many denouements
which _are_ decidedly unnatural, are better tolerated than this would
be. We shall, perhaps, best explain our meaning by examples, taken from
a novel of great merit in many respects. When Lord Glenthorn, in whom a
most unfavourable education has acted on a most unfavourable
disposition, after a life of torpor, broken only by short sallies of
forced exertion, on a sudden reverse of fortune, displays at once the
most persevering diligence in the most repulsive studies, and in middle
life, without any previous habits of exertion, any hope of early
business, or the example of friends, or the stimulus of actual want, to
urge him, outstrips every competitor, though every competitor has every
advantage against him; this is unnatural.--When Lord Glenthorn, the
instant he is stripped of his estates, meets, falls in love with, and is
conditionally accepted by the very lady who is remotely intitled to
those estates; when, the instant he has fulfilled the conditions of
their marriage, the family of the person possessed of the estates
becomes extinct, and by the concurrence of circumst