r than by any deeper law of relation.
Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's
"Henry IV." Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff
of breach of promise to marry her:--

"Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in
my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon
Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking
his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then,
as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife.
Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come
in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of
vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst
desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green
wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to
be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long
they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch
thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath: deny it, if
thou canst."

There are, of course, many deficiencies in Dame Quickly's mental
make-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of the
narrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, in
the first place, she could not select from a muddle of events those
which bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the
second place, she could not arrange them logically instead of
chronologically. She has no sense of series. And although Dame
Quickly's mind is an exaggeration of the type it represents, the type,
in less exaggerated form, is very common; and everybody will agree
that the average man, who has never taken pains to train himself in
narrative, is not able in his ordinary conversation to tell with ease
a logically connected story.

The better sort of narrative sense is not merely an abstract
intellectual understanding of the relation of cause and effect
subsisting between events often disparate in time; it is, rather, a
concrete feeling of the relation. It is an intuitive feeling; and,
being such, it is possessed instinctively by certain minds. There are
people in the world who are natural born story-tellers; all of us
have met with them in actual life: and to this class belong the
story-telling giants, like Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas pere,
Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling. Narrative is natural t