idently exhausted itself. For ten years we had novels of
fashionable life, till the manners and sayings of lordlings and right
honourables had become familiar to all the haberdashers' apprentices and
milliners' girls in London. That vein being worked out, literature has run
into the opposite channel. Action and reaction is the law, not less of the
intellectual than the physical world. Inventive genius has sought out, in
the lower walks of life, those subjects of novel study and fresh
description which could no longer be found in the higher. So far has this
propensity gone, so violent has been the oscillation of the pendulum in
this direction, that novelists have descended to the very lowest stages of
society in the search of the new or the exciting. Not only have the
manners, the selfishness, and vulgarity of the middle ranks been painted
with admirable fidelity, and drawn with inimitable skill, but the habits
and slang of the very lowest portrayed with prurient minuteness, and
interest sought to be awakened in the votaries of fashion or the Sybarites
of pleasure by the delineation of the language and ideas of the most
infamous wretches who ever disgraced society by their vices, or endangered
it by their crimes.

"Whatever," says Dr Johnson, "makes the PAST or the FUTURE predominate
over the present, exalts us in the scale of thinking beings." The words
are familiar till they have become trite; but words are often repeated
when the sense is far off. It is in the general oblivion of the thought of
the philosopher, while his words were in every mouth, that the cause of
the want of originality in modern works of imagination is to be found. If
to the "Past" and the "Future," enumerated by Johnson, we add the
"DISTANT," we shall have an effectual antidote, and the only one which is
effectual against the sameness of present ideas, or the limited circle of
present observation. The tendency to _localize_ is the propensity which
degrades literature, as it is the chief bane and destroyer of individual
character. It is the opposite effect of engendering a tendency to expand,
which constitutes the chief value of travelling in the formation of
character. If the thought and conversation of individuals are limited to
the little circle in which they live, or the objects by which they are
immediately surrounded, we all know what they speedily become. It is in
the extension of the interest to a wider circle, in the admission of
objects of