regard ourselves so much wealthier than the "beggarly foreigner," we have caught the habit of imposing our opinion at all times and places, and for the life of us we cannot see how any should oppose it. The self-conceit engendered by this process has made us something little short of detestable abroad! What lectures have I not heard Brown and Jones administer to foreigners of real distinction ! What sage suggestions to imitate this or that custom of England! totally ignorant, as they might be, of some insuperable obstacle to their suggested improvement.

In the old days of the Peninsular war, we were pretty much like our neighbours. What we could not do by men, we did by money. Now, however, we have grown wiser, and will not spend either. This universal medicine, "moral aid," moral co-operation, or whatever it be called, is the cheap panacea for all troubles. Not but it has met a rather rough experience lately. The Germans wouldn't taste it at all; and I doubt greatly if the Danes will ask for another dose of it.

We may try to laugh at it, but it's too sore to be a joke. One would like, if he could, to take the jest in good part, and show no ill-temper; but it pushes patience too hard to see the hard-won glories of old England so frittered away and dissipated, that every trait by which our fathers stamped manhood on the nation is now insolently denied us, and we are told to go back to our cotton-mills and coal-mines, and leave the game of war and its ambitions to others.

They have a saying in Italy, that there are two things no man ever asks for in vain there-light for his cigar, or the Cross of St. Maurice and St. Lazaro. So in England we are splendidly lavish of our good advice. Would that we could practise a little parsi

mony.

For many reasons we ought not to have taken the German vapour

and bluster so ill. It is very rarely these dull folk indulge themselves with the luxury of being angry. And as for the various modes in which they were to wreak a vengeance on England, they were simply laughable. Perhaps it may proceed from our very affinity-but strange it is, there are few nations have commercially less need of each other than Germany and England.

That Prussian threat t'other day, that if England moved hand or foot, they'd march down and take Hanover! By what confusion of even Berlin brains they imagined this could affect England, is hard to say. They evidently never heard of the remark of the absentee Irish landlord, when he was told that the people had shot his agent. "Strange nation the Irish! What an extraordinary notion it was to imagine that by shooting my agent they could possibly intimidate me!"

To conclude, if we are never to deal in any other ware than "moral aid," let us be frank and open about it. Let us dress the army in drab, and put broadbrims on the navy. Above all, let not our newspapers be filled with target-practice, and the relative merits of Armstrong and Whit worth. The neatest duelling-pistols in the world would never get the owner a character for courage after he refused to fight. I say over and over again, we ought not to go to war. Some hundreds of savages at the end of the earth are giving us quite as much war as we want; and to face armies raised by conscription, with an army supplied by voluntary enlistment, is as rank nonsense as to assert that the financial burdens of a nation could be as easily met by voluntary contributions as by enforced taxation. And let any one imagine Mr. Gladstone standing with a plate at Whitehall, and, even with all the courteous persuasivenesss for which he is known, saying to the passersby, "You are requested to leave something for the support of the institution," and is it likely that

Whatever is voluntary will very seldom be general, and never will be universal. We want soldiers pretty much as we want money; and if it should happen that we need either in large quantities, I am pretty certain we must not depend on Volition for the supply.

I like what in our modern slang are called serial stories. The writers understand one require ment at least of their trade-they do not give too much at a time and in so far they resemble the heads of the profession, the old Eastern story-tellers, who only told the Calif each evening enough to set him asleep. Now this alone is a great point.

Another advantage is this-they cannot cram into their limited space any of those long-winded descriptions, especially of scenery, which the three-volume people are so prone to inflict; neither have they so much of the page open to emotional expatiation. They are bound by their very limits to be more short, sharp, and decisive.

Lastly, they must endeavour to interest by something else than story that is, they must try what can be done to amuse by humoristic views of life, shrewd touches of character, quaint pictures of people not the less recognisable that they are not. met with every day, and occasionally-which Three Volume probably thinks beneath him-they must make us laugh.

In the very fact that the reader is not bound to them beyond the monthly part before him, lies their heaviest obligation to interest him, It is like a shilling stage, and if

you dislike the conveyance, or feel tired of the company, you can get out and walk home. For all these reasons I incline much to the serial.

I do not know how it may be with others, but for myself I am not over-grateful to the man who invests his story with that amount of interest that engrosses my attention too far, and in this way turns me from the real business of life to involve me in cares and sorrows that have no reality. I want to be amused by the novel pretty much as I feel amused by the play-that is, I want what will present a certain number of pictures to my mind without the cost of being obliged to retain them thereafter. If I be obliged to do this, the novel becomes a burthen, not a relaxation. I want, besides, the writer to let me so far into his mind that I may know what he thinks is droll, what strange, what picturesque, what attractive, what ridiculous. When I have arrived at that understanding-any one number will suffice for so much I am able to guess if I should care for more of his company. The three-volume man affords me no such clue as this. All he is thinking of is his wind-up in the last volume. It is for the grand finish alone he cares; his heart, like the Irish postilion's, is

fixed on keeping a "trot for the town." No matter how he stumbled and staggered during the stage, so that he comes up to the door at last with whip-cracking, and the jaded team spirited up to a lively tramp.

The serial writer, too, performs usually to a larger public, and, consequently, is less addicted to conventionalities than Three Volume, who has a more select few for his audience, and who could not so easily stoop to the vulgarity of common people, and their ways and doings. But, as I have said already, the serial is more prone to make me laugh, and for this great gift I prize him most of all. I have very grave doubts if age has anything heavier in all its inflictions than in the difficulty-yearly increasing in a terrific ratio-the difficulty of enjoying a good laugh. For my own part, baldness, adiposity, and suchlike, are all lighter evils to me than the gravity I feel stealing over me, the little tolerance I have for small fun, and the growing conviction that the pleasant people have gone home, and that I am left to walk back with the dreary ones.

That my own capacity for the enjoyment is not totally blunted, I can test by seeing how the old racy humour of Molière and Cervantes how Scott, too, and Sidney Smith -continue to amuse me. What has become of this gift? is it gone and lost, like the art of painting on glass, like the glaze of Luca della Robbia, or the wonderful potterypaste of Maestro Giorgio? One thing is certain, Three Volume has none of it; and, latterly, the serial has not more than enough to season his quality and remind you of bygones. As nothing so much disgusts a man with wine-drinking as plying him for a while with bad liquor, so there is no such certain death to the appreciation of real humour as in the race of small jokers perpetually letting off a fire of petty drolleries suggested by the passing events of the hour. If there be a

an

public for these, heaven help the real humorist when he craves audience! That there is a public for them he would be a bold man that should deny, and a very large and a very faithful public, too!

I do not make a great demand on my novelist. I ask him to help me through a stray hour of ennui, a dreary half-day of rainy weather in a dull house, the time I have to wait for my train, or the morning in which the post has either failed or brought nothing of any interest. I protest loudly and in toto against accepting the storyteller as either preacher or teacher. I will neither listen to him about law reform, nor prison discipline, nor madhouses, nor public schools. Let him, if he must, season his pages by the introduction of these institutions; but let him not insinuate his own theories about their management, or pretend to tell me how much more smoothly would suits in Equity go were he the Chancellor, or what a happy day would it be for the lunatics did the writer sit in Whitehall with the dignity of a Commissioner. I never heard an amateur fiddler that one would have given a sixpence to; and I have rarely seen one of those wouldbe reformers in fiction who approached his subject with even the vaguest knowledge of its details, or any conception of its difficulties. "Mark me, Mr. Vagabond," said Junius to Garrick, when the actor, forgetting his real province, had attempted a negotiation with the publisher to betray the name of the great satirist "mark me, Mr. Vagabond; stick to your pantomimes.

Let

I do not think there is anything so good in Alexandre Dumas as his total exemption from this vice. He never tries the didactic, and I respect him for his abstinence. not the clown, when he casts a somersault in the circus, tell me that he means to emblematise the motion of the earth! Suum cuique. Let the story-teller understand that his mission is simply to amuse without any outrage to good manners,

or any offence to good morals. Let him be as pleasant as he can, and leave the task of making the world better and wiser to men who have to accept the charge with heavier responsibilities than attach to talewriting.

Scott understood something about his craft, and something about the world too. Had he deemed that fiction was the proper channel to instil correct notions about hospitals for the blind, drainage of towns, ragged-schools, or reformatories, we should doubtless have had these and suchlike discussed, though, perhaps, we might have lost something in not having the "Antiquary,' 'Ivanhoe,' and a score more as good.

Balzac, also, wrote indifferent good novels, and knew one sort of life as few others ever did, and yet he never addressed himself to assail some institution or attack some system. He knew well that no group of people ever yet lived who revolved round one grievance; that life is a very particoloured affair, and, however a particular wrong may tinge existence, that the daily business of the world goes on amidst innumerable cares and troubles and joys and anxieties, and it is of these fiction ought to treat, showing as truthfully as she can what human nature does, says, thinks, and endures, with very little reference to some great stumbling-block, which, after all, has hurt the shins of only one, perhaps, in the company.

That the ordinary business of life can go on amidst the most terrible convulsions, and men follow the pursuits, of ambition, of pleasure, or of money-getting, unaffect ed by that great event which in history will absorb the whole page, will be readily acknowledged by any one who will turn to the memoirs of the years of the French Revolution, or the Magazines of Ireland during '98. Jeffrey, in one of his essays, remarks on this, and says, that while posterity will be entirely occupied by the dreadful phantom of the Reign of Terror,

nothing in the actual records of the time will recall it.

It is hard to believe or to understand it, but the literature of France in those dreadful years ran upon idylls and odes and pastorals. Pastorals, when the creak of the charrette that carried the victims to the scaffold was the one sound heard in the streets! when the channels ran with blood, amidst the carnage of helpless women, and the noyades of the Loire ! Pastorals! One is inclined to ask, Is it in ethics as in optics, and does the eye, gorged and inflamed by red, turn to seek repose, to rest upon green?

Now, if Fiction had to deal with this era, we should find the guillotine in every page. Every event and every action would revolve around the scaffold; the headsman everywhere-everywhere the axe: and what truth would there be in such a portraiture?

The Irish rebellion of '98 was, while it lasted, a dreadful scene of cruelty and carnage on all sides; and yet I have heard more stories of convivial gaiety, more narratives of country-house life and hospitality, of that period, than of all I ever remember to have heard of any other time of Irish history.

Of what is now going on in America, let Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, in their respective spheres, tell how much sympathy is felt for the countless thousands dying in every form of agony, or coming back, pitiably maimed and crippled, to drag out lives of suffering and penury! Fiction would doubtless paint New York breathless for the last news from the battle-field; and so it might, but not for the record of victory or defeat as a source of triumph or sorrow, but simply to know how it would affect the exchanges, or react on the price of gold.

To my thinking, Les Misérables' is only a blue-book gone mad; and \ a census return done by a sensational hand would be just as amusing reading as any of this school.

There is another practice of certain novelists which annoys me not a little that is, to dish up the same characters either as principals or secondaries in every story. It is not merely objectionable on the ground that character-drawing is almost the best part of fiction, as it is certainly the most instructive; but there is such poverty in invention, or such inveterate indolence, implied in the practice. It is bad enough if a strolling company must perform 'Coriolanus' with the same corps that gave the 'Road to Ruin;' and it is hard to surrender one's sympathy to Romeo, when he perpetually recalls Jeremy Diddler: still, these poor creatures do their utmost so to disguise their identities that you shall not detect them. Whereas, in the novel, it is the same dreary personage that broke your heart in the Three Crows, that is now dogging your steps in Drivelling Manor;' and the Bore that cost you the thread of one story by your efforts to skip him, turns up in a totally different book to be your misery once more.

When Sancho was relating the memorable story of the shepherd to his master, he found himself suddenly arrested in his narrative by Don Quixote's inability to tell how many sheep had been ferried over the stream. "Fore God," said he, "if you have forgotten the score, it is impossible for me to continue the story." These people are, however, more exacting still, for they call on you to bear in mind who was each person's father and mother, who their uncles and aunts and good friends. A name turns up suddenly in the story without any intimation who he is and whence he comes. You turn back to trace ⚫ him; alas, it is to a story published the year before, and nine others dating successively as many years back, you must go a labour that may possibly not be requited by any interest intended to surround him. In the reading of these books, if not well "posted" in all by the same author, and gifted with a retentive

memory besides, a man feels like a parvenu suddenly introduced into a society where, except himself, each knows and is known to his neighbour. He has the humiliating consciousness that in a company so intimately united, he himself, the intruder, is de trop. He sees that every one knows the Duke of Allsorts, and that nobody is surprised when Lady Mumford appears, and he naturally concludes that he has no business in a society where he is the only one who has to inquire who are those around him. Why will not these writers give us with a new book a chronological table, and let us learn who begat whom?

But, in point of fact, the thing is, harder than mere chronology-it is far more; it is the Darwinian theory applied to fiction, and the law of development introduced into tale-writing. The homunculus of some book of ten years ago, may be the foreground figure of a later work; and the child you have scarcely noticed at one time, may have been developed into the grandmother of a present heroine.

I

This is simply intolerable. ask for a story, and you give me a census return; I want a tale, and I get an extract from a baptismal registry.

There are a few characters of fiction, and really they are very few, that could not recur too often. It would be difficult to shut the door against Sancho, or Falstaff, or perhaps Dugald Dalgetty; but have the writers I have just been speaking of given us any creations like these? or are not their personages only real in the one respect, that they are as tiresome as living men?

Let me record one splendid exception from this judgment in him who has given to our fiction-literature a racy vigour and a freshness which only genius can give. The greatest imaginative writer, unquestionably, since Shakespeare, is the author of Chuzzlewit.' With him we encounter no repetitions; all is varied, novel, and interesting as na