A good woman in the country once complained of her stepson, ’He will not love his learning, though I beats him with a jack-chain;’ and from the application of similar aids to instruction, the same result takes place in London.  Only here we dissemble and pretend to love it.  It is partly in consequence of this that works, not only of acknowledged but genuine excellence, such as those I have been careful to select, are, though so universally praised, so little read.  The poor student attempts them, but failing—­from many causes no doubt, but also sometimes from the fact of their not being there—­to find those unrivalled beauties which he has been led to expect in every sentence, he stops short, where he would otherwise have gone on.  He says to himself, ‘I have been deceived,’ or ‘I must be a born fool;’ whereas he is wrong in both suppositions.  I am convinced that the want of popularity of Walter Scott among the rising generation is partly due to this extravagant laudation; and I am much mistaken if another great author, more recently deceased, will not in a few years be added to the ranks of those who are more praised than read from the same cause.

The habit of mere adhesion to received opinion in any matter is most mischievous, for it strikes at the root of independence of thought; and in literature it tends to make the public taste mechanical.  It is very seldom that what is called the verdict of posterity (absurdly enough, for are not we posterity?) is ever reversed; but it has chanced to happen in a certain case quite lately.  The production of ’The Iron Chest’ upon the stage has once more brought into fashion ’Caleb Williams.’  Now that is a work, though by no means belonging to the same rank as those to which I have referred, which has a fine old crusted reputation.  Time has hallowed it.  The great world of readers (who have never read it) used to echo the remark of Bias and Company, that this and that modern work of fiction reminded them—­though at an immense distance, of course—­of Godwin’s masterpiece.  I remember Le Fanu’s ‘Uncle Silas,’ for example (from some similarity, more fanciful perhaps than real, in the isolation of its hero), being thus compared with it.  Now ‘Caleb Williams’ is founded on a very fine conception—­one that could only have occurred, perhaps, to a man of genius; the first part of it is well worked out, but towards the middle it grows feeble, and it ends in tediousness and drivel; whereas ‘Uncle Silas’ is good and strong from first to last.  Le Fanu has never been so popular as, in my humble judgment, he deserves to be, but of course modern readers were better acquainted with him than with Godwin.  Yet nine out of ten were always heard repeating this cuckoo cry about the latter’s superiority, until the ‘Iron Chest’ came out, and Fashion induced them to read Godwin for themselves; which has very properly changed their opinion.