"cultivated" people. We are convinced that if the (so-called) "uncultivated" people only knew what delight they might find in Lowell's prose and verse, they would domesticate his books at once in their homes. The only criticism which a "cultivated" man is inclined to make on Lowell is simply this: that he is the most exasperating of literary aristocrats in his dealings with the middle class and lower class of literary people. The middle and lower classes, who live their lives without pretending to versify them, find in him the most sympathizing of brothers and friends; but woe to any one of them who puts his mediocrity into rhyme!

IN DICKENS-LAND.

THE reason that everybody likes novels is, that everybody is more or less a novelist. In addition to the practical life that men and women lead, constantly vexed, as it is, by obstructive facts, there is an interior life which they imagine, in which facts smoothly give way to sentiments, ideas, and aspirations. In this imagined existence people strengthen themselves with new faculties, exalt themselves with new passions, surround themselves with new companions, devote themselves to new objects. They are richer, handsomer, braver, wittier, nobler, more disinterested, more adventurous, more efficient, than they are in their actual personalities and mode of living. They construct long stories, long as their own lives, of which they are the heroes or heroines; and the novels they best like to read are those whose scenes and characters best fit into the novel they are themselves incessantly weaving. The universality of selfesteem is probably due to the fact that people confuse the possibilities of their existence with its actualities. Each being the hero of "My Novel," gains selfimportance in virtue of that; and while externally classed with the "nobodies," is internally conscious of ranking with the "somebodies." Burn out of a

man indeed everything else, sense, sensibility, and conscience, you will still find alive in his ashes a little self-conceit and a little imagination.

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“How much do you weigh?" a man was asked. Well," he replied, "ordinarily only a hundred and twenty pounds; but when I'm mad, I weigh a ton!" But the great increase of weight arises when a person is kindled with a conception of what he has a possibility of becoming.

It is evident that, as these novel-spinning factories are in full operation in all heads, the only check on their written production is the necessity for some talent for narrative and some knack in composition. Hence, in the first place, a swarm of romancers, who have properly no place in literature, and who represent every variety of mediocrity, from the fussy and furious dead-level of sensationalism to the tame and timid dead-level of conventionality. Some put blood in their ink, some water; but it must be said that in these matters blood is not always thicker than water. Rise a step above this level, introduce some art in the plot and some truth in the characterization, keep as close to actual life as a photographer, be as diffuse and as dogged in details as is consistent with preserving a kind of languid interest, economize material, whether of incident or emotion, realize Carlyle's sarcasm that England contains twenty millions of people, mostly bores, and you have Anthony Trollope, the most unromantic of romancers, popular in virtue of his skill in reproducing a popula

tion. Vitalize this dull reality by vivid feeling, put passion into everything, eliminate all that does not stimulate, be as fruitful in incidents as Trollope is in commonplaces, envelop the reader in a whirl of events, drag him violently on through a series of minor unexpected catastrophes to the grand unexpected catastrophe at the end, heap stimulants on him until he feels like a mad Malay running amuck through the streets, and you have Charles Reade, the great master of melodramatic effect. This social life which Trollope does not penetrate, which Reade exaggerates, look at it with a curious, sceptical eye, sharpened by a jaded heart; be superior to all the fine illusions of existence, by defect of spiritual insight as well as by subtlety of external observation; lay bare all the hypocrisies and rascalities of "proper" people without losing faith in the possibility of virtue; survey men and women in their play rather than in their real struggle and work; bring all the resources of keen observation, incisive wit, and delicate humor to the task of exhibiting the frailties of humanity without absolutely teaching that it is hopelessly vicious and effete, be, in short, a sceptical Hume turned novelist, and you have Thackeray, a kindly man of genius, honestly forced by his peculiar intellect and experience to inculcate the dreadful doctrine that life does not pay. Add Thackeray's sharp and bright perception to Trollope's nicety in detail, and supplement both with large scholarship and wide reach of philosophic insight; conceive a person who looks not

only at life and into life, but through it, who sympathizes with the gossip of peasants and the principles of advanced thinkers, who is as capable of reproducing Fergus O'Conner as John Stuart Mill, and is as blandly tolerant of Garrison as of Hegel, and you have the wonderful woman who calls herself George Eliot, probably the largest mind among the romancers of the century, but with an incurable sadness at the depth of her nature which deprives her of the power to cheer the readers she interests and informs.

It may here be said that in a peculiar and restricted domain of imagination the great American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has fairly outmatched all his English brethren. He is the Jonathan Edwards of the imaginative representation of life, as Thackeray is its Hume. He teaches with vivid distinctness the doctrine of "the exceeding sinfulness of sin." Scott once said that there were depths in human nature which it was unhealthy to attempt to sound; and it is in attempting to sound these that Hawthorne has exhibited his most marvellous gifts of insight and characterization. In the subtlety and accuracy, the penetration and sureness, of his glance into the morbid phenomena of the human soul; in exhibiting the operation of the most delicate laws of attraction and repulsion which human natures can experience; in the capacity to terrify his readers with the consciousness of their latent possibilities for evil, so that they shrink from his pitiless exposures "like