and simple notions she entertained of the great world, and what
charming qualities of unsophisticated character belonged to her as she
merrily or pensively went through her accustomed tasks. The fourth line,
in which love is the text, would swell into mammoth proportions. New
characters would be especially necessary in this culminating part of the
story; and though they should be "very few," they would long occupy the
novelist with their diverse excellencies or villanies, their rivalries
and strategies. It is probable that the complete development of the
stanza _a la romance_ would give a circumstantial history of the maiden
from her birth, with glimpses more or less clear of all the remarkable
people who dwelt near or occasionally visited the springs of Dove. Thus
the same conception would become a stanza or a volume, according as its
treatment were lyrical or romantic.

It need hardly be shown that the novel is not a drama, not a history,
nor fable, nor any sort of philosophical treatise. It may have
sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps chapters, in every style and of the
highest excellence, as a shapeless architectural pile may rejoice in
some exquisite features or ornaments; but combined passages, though they
were the collected charms of literature, do not make a work of art. The
styles are mixed,--a certain sign, according to Lessing, of corruption
of taste. Novels present the anomaly of being fiction, but not
poetry,--of being fruits of imagination, but of imagination improvising
its creations from local and temporal things, instead of speaking from
a sublime stand-point and linking series of facts with processions of
ideas. Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they
may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for
the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers"
for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the
undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens's imagination.

If the novel be thus excluded from all the classical orders of
literature, a trembling question is suggested, whether it may not be
nevertheless a legitimate work of art. Though it be a _melange_ of
styles, a story told, in literature what the story-teller is in
society, yet why should it not have the honor among readers which
the story-teller in all ages has had among listeners? Though by
its escutcheon it assume a place among the amusing rather than the
instructive class of books, why sh