It may be said, in answer, that these objections apply only to the unskilful novelist, who, from ignorance of the world, gives an unnatural representation of what he professes to delineate.  This is partly true, and partly not; for there is a distinction to be made between the unnatural and the merely improbable:  a fiction is unnatural when there is some assignable reason against the events taking place as described,—­when men are represented as acting contrary to the character assigned them, or to human nature in general; as when a young lady of seventeen, brought up in ease, luxury and retirement, with no companions but the narrow-minded and illiterate, displays (as a heroine usually does) under the most trying circumstances, such wisdom, fortitude, and knowledge of the world, as the best instructors and the best examples can rarely produce without the aid of more mature age and longer experience.—­On the other hand, a fiction is still improbable, though not unnatural, when there is no reason to be assigned why things should not take place as represented, except that the overbalance of chances is against it; the hero meets, in his utmost distress, most opportunely, with the very person to whom he had formerly done a signal service, and who happens to communicate to him a piece of intelligence which sets all to rights.  Why should he not meet him as well as any one else? all that can be said is, that there is no reason why he should.  The infant who is saved from a wreck, and who afterwards becomes such a constellation of virtues and accomplishments, turns out to be no other than the nephew of the very gentleman, on whose estate the waves had cast him, and whose lovely daughter he had so long sighed for in vain:  there is no reason to be given, except from the calculation of chances, why he should not have been thrown on one part of the coast as well as another.  Nay, it would be nothing unnatural, though the most determined novel-reader would be shocked at its improbability, if all the hero’s enemies, while they were conspiring his ruin were to be struck dead together by a lucky flash of lightning:  yet many denouements which are decidedly unnatural, are better tolerated than this would be.  We shall, perhaps, best explain our meaning by examples, taken from a novel of great merit in many respects.  When Lord Glenthorn, in whom a most unfavourable education has acted on a most unfavourable disposition, after a life of torpor, broken only by short sallies of forced exertion, on a sudden reverse of fortune, displays at once the most persevering diligence in the most repulsive studies, and in middle life, without any previous habits of exertion, any hope of early business, or the example of friends, or the stimulus of actual want, to urge him, outstrips every competitor, though every competitor has every advantage against him; this is unnatural.—­When Lord Glenthorn, the instant he is stripped of his estates, meets,