tastes
are not corrupted by gluttony and strong drink." And a plateful of
raspberries and cream disappeared before the philosopher.

You take the allegory? Novels are sweets. All people with healthy
literary appetites love them--almost all women;--a vast number of
clever, hard-headed men. Why, one of the most learned physicians in
England said to me only yesterday, "I have just read So-and-So for
the second time" (naming one of Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges,
bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as
well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers. Who
has not read about Eldon, and how he cried over novels every night when
he was not at whist?

As for that lazy naughty boy at Chur, I doubt whether HE will like
novels when he is thirty years of age. He is taking too great a glut of
them now. He is eating jelly until he will be sick. He will know most
plots by the time he is twenty, so that HE will never be surprised when
the Stranger turns out to be the rightful earl,--when the old waterman,
throwing off his beggarly gabardine, shows his stars and the collars of
his various orders, and clasping Antonia to his bosom, proves himself
to be the prince, her long-lost father. He will recognize the
novelist's same characters, though they appear in red-heeled pumps and
ailes-de-pigeon, or the garb of the nineteenth century. He will get
weary of sweets, as boys of private schools grow (or used to grow, for
I have done growing some little time myself, and the practice may have
ended too)--as private school-boys used to grow tired of the pudding
before their mutton at dinner.

And pray what is the moral of this apologue? The moral I take to be
this: the appetite for novels extending to the end of the world; far
away in the frozen deep, the sailors reading them to one another during
the endless night;--far away under the Syrian stars, the solemn sheikhs
and elders hearkening to the poet as he recites his tales; far away in
the Indian camps, where the soldiers listen to ----'s tales, or ----'s,
after the hot day's march; far away in little Chur yonder, where the
lazy boy pores over the fond volume, and drinks it in with all his
eyes;--the demand being what we know it is, the merchant must supply it,
as he will supply saddles and pale ale for Bombay or Calcutta.

But as surely as the cadet drinks too much pale ale, it will disagree
with him; and so surely, dear youth, will too mu