uidly monstrous character developed in an atmosphere
of low vitality, have become the most valued material of modern
fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy.

The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be massed
under a few general heads.

I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the
population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,
as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and
infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The
resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in
a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly
developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the
description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.

In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,
of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his
two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He
marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and
provides for his favourite a separate and clandestine establishment with
her lover. On his deathbed, he sends for this favourite daughter, who
wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,
and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief
ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.

This story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and
spectral catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large
city. A village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his
daughters to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children
brought to him, if in the neighbourhood, by fear of village gossip, if
for no better cause.

II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of science
in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the carefullest
forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere
trampling pressure and electric friction of town life, become to the
sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness, and frightful
in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings over them for
evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the pollution, and of
their own wills to oppose the weight, of the staggering mass that chokes
and crushes them into perdition, brings every l