nearly as possible of nothing,-thus refreshing herself for her daily toils; as a man may, without reproach, devote a small portion of his day to loafing and lounging about his club; so in those perhaps healthier days did a small modicum of novel-reading begin to be permitted. Where now is the reading individual for whom a small modicum suffices?

And very evil things have been said of the writers of novels by their brethren in literature; as though these workers, whose work has gradually become so efficacious for good or evil, had done nothing but harm in the world. It would be useless, or even ungenerous now, to quote essayists, divines, and historians who have written of novelists as though the mere providing of a little fleeting amusement, -generally of pernicious amusement, -had been the only object in their view. But our readers will be aware that if such criticism does not now exist, it has not ceased so long but that they remember its tone. The ordinary old homily against the novel, inveighing against the frivolities, the falsehood, and perhaps the licentiousness, of a fictitious narrative, is still familiar to our ears. Though we may reckon among our dearest literary possessions the pathos of this story, the humour of another, the unerring truth to nature of a third; though we may be aware of the absolute national importance to us of a Robinson Crusoe or Tom Jones, of an Ivanhoe or an Esmond; though each of us in his own heart may know all that a good novel has done for him,-still there remains something of the bad character which for years has been attached to the art.

Quo semel est imbuta recens, servabit odorem
Testa diu.

Even though it be true that the novels of the present day have in great measure taken the place of sermons, and that they feed the imagination too often in lieu of poetry, still they are admitted to their high functions not without forebodings, not without remonstrances, not without a certain sense that we are giving up our young people into the hands of an Apollyon. Is this teacher an Apollyon; or is he better because stronger, and as moral-as an archbishop?

It is certainly the case that novels deal mainly with one subject, -that, namely, of love; and equally certain that love is a matter in handling which for the instruction or delectation of the young there is much danger. This is what the novelist does daily, and, whatever may be the danger, he is accepted. We quite agree with the young lady in the Hunchback who declared that Ovid was a fool. To call that thing an art which art is none.'

No art but taketh time and pains to learn.

Love comes with neither.

So much the novelist knows as well as Sheridan Knowles's young lady,

and therefore sets about his work with descriptive rather than didactic lessons. His pupils would not accept them were he to tell them that he came into the house as a tutor in such an art. But still as a tutor he is accepted. What can be of more importance to us than to know whether we who all of us encourage such tutors in our houses, are subjecting those we love to good teaching or to ill? We do not dare to say openly to those dear ones, but we confess it to ourselves, that the one thing of most importance to them is whether they shall love rightly or wrongly. The sweet, innocent, bashful girl, who never to her dearest bosom friend dares to talk upon the matter, knows that it must be so for herself. Will it be her happy future to be joined to some man who, together with the energy necessary for maintaining her and her children, shall also have a loving heart and a sweet temper?-or shall she, through dire mistake, in this great affair of her life fall into some unutterable abyss of negligence, poverty, and heartless indifference? All this is vague, though still certain, to the girl herself. But to the mother it is in no way vague. Night and morning it must be her dearest prayer that the man who shall take her girl from her shall be worthy of her girl. And the importance to the man, though not so strongly felt, is equal. As it is not his lot to rise and fall in the world as his partner may succeed or the reverse, the image of a wife does not force itself upon his thoughts so vividly as does that of a husband on the female mind; but, as she is dependent on him for all honour, so he is on her for all happiness. It suits us to speak of love as a soft, sweet, flowery pastime, with many roses and some thorns, in which youth is apt to disport itself; but there is no father, no mother, no daughter, and should be no son, blind to the fact that, of all matters concerning life, it is the most important. That Ovid's Art of Love was nothing, much worse than nothing, we admit. But nevertheless the art is taught. Before the moment comes in which heart is given to heart, the imagination has been instructed as to what should accompany the gift, and what should be expected in accompaniment; in what way the gift should be made, and after what assurance; for how long a period silence should be held, and then how far speech should be unguarded.

By those who do not habitually read at all, the work is done somewhat roughly, we will not say thoughtlessly, but with little of those precautions which education demands. With those who do read, all that literature gives them helps them somewhat in the operation of which we are speaking. History tells us much of love's efficacy, and much of the evil that comes from the want of it. Biography is of course full of it. Philosophy deals with it. Poetry is hardly poetry without it. The drama is built on it almost as exclusively as are the novels. But it is from novels that the crowd of expectant and ready pupils obtain that constant flow of easy

teaching which fills the mind of all readers with continual thoughts of love. The importance of the teaching is mainly to the young, but the existence of the teaching is almost equally present to the old. Why is it that the judge when he escapes from the bench, the bishop even, as we are told,-when he comes from his confirmation, the politician as he sits in the library of the House, the Cabinet Minister when he has a half-hour to himself, the old dowager in almost all the hours which she has to herself,-seek for distraction and reaction in the pages of a novel? It is because there is an ever-recurring delight in going back to the very rudiments of those lessons in love.

'My dear,' says the loving but only half-careful mother to her daughter, I wish you wouldn't devote so many of your hours to novel-reading. How far have you got with your Gibbon ?' Whereupon the young lady reads a page or two of Gibbon, and then goes back to her novels. The mother knows that her girl is good, and does not make herself unhappy. Is she justified in her security by the goodness of the teaching? There is good and bad, no doubt. In speaking of good and bad we are not alluding to virtue and vice themselves, but to the representations made of them. If virtue be made ridiculous, no description of it will be serviceable. If vice be made alluring, the picture will certainly be injurious. Sydney Smith, as far as it went, did an injury to morality at large when he declared in one of his letters that the Prime Minister of the day was 'faithful to Mrs. Percival.' Desiring to make the Prime Minister ridiculous, he endeavoured to throw a stone at that domesticity which the Prime Minister was supposed to cherish, and doing so he taught evil. Gay did injury to morality when he persuaded all the town to sympathise with a thief. The good teaching of a novel may be evinced as much in displaying the base as the noble, if the base be made to look base as the noble is made to look noble.

If we look back to the earlier efforts of English novel writing, the lessons taught were too often bad. Though there was a wide world of British fiction before the time of Charles the Second, it generally took the shape of the drama, and of that, whether good or bad, in its results we have at present nothing to say. The prose romances were few in number, and entertained so limited an audience that they were not efficacious for good or evil. The people would flock to see plays, where plays could be produced for them, as in London,-but did not as yet care to feed their imaginations by reading. Then came the novelists of Charles the Second, who, though they are less profligate and also more stupid than is generally supposed of them, could certainly do no good to the mind of any reader. Of our novelists the first really known is Defoe, who, though he was born almost within the Commonwealth, did not produce his Robinson Crusoe till the time of George the First. Robinson Crusoe did not deal with love. Defoe's other stories, which are happily forgotten,

are bad in their very essence. what a bad book may be. It relates the adventures of a woman thoroughly depraved, and yet for the most part successful,-is intended to attract by its licentiousness, and puts off till the end the stale scrap of morality which is brought in as a salve to the conscience of the writer. Putting aside Robinson Crusoe, which has been truly described as an accident, Defoe's teaching as a novelist has been altogether bad. Then, mentioning only the names which are well known to us, we come first to Richardson, who has been called the inventor of the modern English novel. It certainly was his object to write of love, so that young women might be profited by what he wrote,--and we may say that he succeeded. It cannot be doubted that he had a strong conscience in his work,-that he did not write only to please, or only for money, or only for reputation, nor for those three causes combined; but that he might do good to those for whom he was writing. In this respect he certainly was the inventor of the modern English novel. That his works will ever become popular again we doubt. Macaulay expressed an exaggerated praise for Clarissa, which brought forth new editions,-even an abridgment of the novel; but the tone is too melancholy, and is played too exclusively on a single string for the taste of a less patient age. Nor would his teaching, though it was good a hundred and thirty years ago, be good now. Against the horrors to which his heroine was subjected, it is not necessary to warn our girls in this safer age, or to speak of them.

Roxana is an accurate sample of

Of Fielding and Smollett,-whom, however, it is unfair to bracket, -it can hardly be said that their conscience was as clear in the matter of what they wrote as was that of Richardson, though probably each of them felt that the aim he had in view was to satirise vice. Defoe might have said the same. But when the satirist lingers lovingly over the vice which he castigates so as to allure by his descriptions, it may be doubted whether he does much service to morality. Juvenal was perhaps the sternest moral censor whom the world of letters has produced; but he was, and even in his own age must have been felt to be, a most lascivious writer. Fielding, who in the construction of a story and the development of a character is supreme among novelists, is, we think, open to the same reproach. That Smollett was so the readers of Roderick Random and his other stories are well aware; and in him the fault was more conspicuous than in Fielding,—without the great redeeming gifts. Novelists followed, one after another, whose tales were good enough to remain in our memories, though we cannot say that their work was effective for any special purpose. Among those Goldsmith was the first and the greatest. His Vicar of Wakefield has taken a hold on our national literature equalled perhaps by no other novel.

It is not my purpose to give a history of English fiction. Its next

conspicuous phase was that of the awe-striking mysterious romances, such as the Mysteries of Udolpho and the Italian, by which we may say no such lessons were taught as those of which we are speaking, either for good or bad. The perusal of them left little behind beyond a slightly morbid tone of the imagination. They excited no passions, and created no beliefs. There was Godwin, a man whose mind was prone to revel in the injuries which an unfortunate might be subjected to by the injustice of the world; and Mrs. Inchbald, who longed to be passionate, though in the Simple Story, by which we know her, she hardly rose to the height of passion; and Miss Burney, who was a Richardson in petticoats, but with a woman's closer appreciation of the little details of life. After them, or together with them, and together also with the names which will follow them, flourished the Rosa Matilda school of fiction, than which the desire to have something to read has produced nothing in literature more vapid or more mean. Up to this time there was probably no recognised attempt on the part of the novelist himself, except by Richardson, and perhaps by Miss Burney, to teach any lesson, to give out any code of morals, to preach as it were a sermon from his pulpit, as the parson preaches his sermon. The business was chance business, the tendency being good if the tendency of the mind of the worker was good; or bad if that was bad. Then came Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, who, the one in Ireland and the other in England, determined to write tales which should have a wholesome bearing. In this they were thoroughly successful, and were the first to convince the British matron that her darling girl might be amused by light literature without injury to her purity. For there had been about Miss Burney, in spite of her morality, a smell of the torchlights of iniquity which had been offensive to the nose of the ordinary British matron. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, did fall away a little towards the end of her long career; but, as we all know, a well-established character may bear a considerable strain. Miss Austen from first to last was the same, with no touch of rampant fashion. Her young ladies indeed are very prone to look for husbands; but when this is done with proper reticence, with no flavour of gaslight, the British matron can excuse a little evil in that direction for the sake of the good.

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6

Then Scott arose, who still towers among us as the first of novelists. He himself tells us that he was prompted to write Scotch. novels by the success of Miss Edgeworth's Irish tales. Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be done for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth achieved for Ireland.' It no doubt was the case that the success of Miss Edgeworth stimulated him to prose fiction; but we cannot but feel that there must have present to him from first to last, through his long career of

been