to the small
portions into which it would have to be divided here for only a month's
supply, you will (I think) at once discover the impossibility of
publishing it in weekly parts. The scheme of the chapters, the manner of
introducing the people, the progress of the interest, the places in
which the principal places fall, are all hopelessly against it. It would
seem as though the story were never coming, and hardly ever moving.
There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of
publication, and I cannot better express the difficulty and labour of it
than by asking you to turn over any two weekly numbers of "A Tale of Two
Cities," or "Great Expectations," or Bulwer's story, or Wilkie
Collins's, or Reade's, or "At the Bar," and notice how patiently and
expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in these
fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted
whole.

Of the story itself I honestly say that I think highly. The style is
particularly easy and agreeable, infinitely above ordinary writing, and
sometimes reminds me of Mrs. Inchbald at her best. The characters are
remarkably well observed, and with a rare mixture of delicacy and
truthfulness. I observe this particularly in the brother and sister, and
in Mrs. Neville. But it strikes me that you constantly hurry your
narrative (and yet without getting on) _by telling it, in a sort of
impetuous breathless way, in your own person, when the people should
tell it and act it for themselves_. My notion always is, that when I
have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their
business to do it, and not mine. Then, unless you really have led up to
a great situation like Basil's death, you are bound in art to make more
of it. Such a scene should form a chapter of itself. Impressed upon the
reader's memory, it would go far to make the fortune of the book.
Suppose yourself telling that affecting incident in a letter to a
friend. Wouldn't you describe how you went through the life and stir of
the streets and roads to the sick-room? Wouldn't you say what kind of
room it was, what time of day it was, whether it was sunlight,
starlight, or moonlight? Wouldn't you have a strong impression on your
mind of how you were received, when you first met the look of the dying
man, what strange contrasts were about you and struck you? I don't want
you, in a novel, to present _yourself_ to tell such things, but I want
the thin