What, then, is the highest excellence that the novel can attain?  It is the carnival of literary art.  It deals sympathetically and humorously, not philosophically and strictly, with the panorama and the principles of life.  A transcript, but not a transfiguration of Nature, it assumes a thousand forms, surpassing all other books in the immense latitude left to the writer, in the wild variety of things which it may touch, but need not grasp.  Its elements are the forests, the cities, and the seven ages of man,—­characters and fortunes how diversified!  All species of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting his moving picture.  Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor characters or actions profoundly understood.  It must be an engrossing story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the conversation of an evening party.  The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as scenes and topics succeed each other.  The pure forms of literature may be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediaeval festival of the Church.  Conceive the stars dropped from their place in the apparent heavens, and playing at shuttlecock with each other and with boys, and having a heyday of careless joyousness here below, instead of remaining in sublime dignity to guide and inspire men who look up to them by night!  Even such are the epic, the lyric, the drama, the history, and the philosophy, as collected together in the revelries of the novel.  To state the degree of excellence possible to a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the author of talent free to range through all books and all time and reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,—­which, with no other connecting thread than a story, freaks like a spirit through every shade of feeling and region of thought, from the domestic hearth to the ultimate bounds of speculative inquiry,—­and which, by its daring and careless combinations of incongruous elements, exhibits a free embodiment in prose of the peculiar genius of the romantic.