In all these dread contingencies the mind of the reader was expected to sympathize, since by incidents so much beyond the bounds of his ordinary experience, his wonder and interest ought at once to be excited.  But gradually he became familiar with the land of fiction, the adventures of which he assimilated not with those of real life, but with each other.  Let the distress of the hero or heroine be ever so great, the reader reposed an imperturbable confidence in the talents of the author, who, as he had plunged them into distress, would in his own good time, and when things, as Tony Lumkin says, were in a concatenation accordingly, bring his favourites out of all their troubles.  Mr. Crabbe has expressed his own and our feelings excellently on this subject.

  For should we grant these beauties all endure
  Severest pangs, they’ve still the speediest cure;
  Before one charm be withered from the face,
  Except the bloom which shall again have place,
  In wedlock ends each wish, in triumph all disgrace. 
  And life to come, we fairly may suppose,
  One light bright contrast to these wild dark woes.

In short, the author of novels was, in former times, expected to tread pretty much in the limits between the concentric circles of probability and possibility; and as he was not permitted to transgress the latter, his narrative, to make amends, almost always went beyond the bounds of the former.  Now, although it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human life have occasionally led an individual through as many scenes of singular fortune as are represented in the most extravagant of these fictions, still the causes and personages acting on these changes have varied with the progress of the adventurer’s fortune, and do not present that combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe.  Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel.  The life of man rolls forth like a stream from the fountain, or it spreads out into tranquillity like a placid or stagnant lake.  In the latter case, the individual grows old among the characters with whom he was born, and is contemporary,—­shares precisely the sort of weal and woe to which his birth destined him,—­ moves in the same circle,—­and, allowing for the change of seasons, is influenced by, and influences the same class of persons by which he was originally surrounded.  The man of mark and of adventure, on the contrary, resembles, in the course of his life, the river whose mid-current and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from each other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers which its fountains first reflected; violent changes of time, of place, and of circumstances, hurry him forward from one scene to another, and his adventures will usually be found only connected with each other because