Works of fiction occupied with purely imaginary or supernatural subjects have been comparatively rare.  While Byron, Shelley and his wife were living at the Lake of Geneva, a rainy week kept them indoors, and all three occupied themselves with reading or inventing ghost stories.  Mrs. Shelley, who was the daughter of Godwin the novelist, and who inherited his intensity of imagination, reproduced the impressions then made upon her mind in the remarkable but disagreeable romance of “Frankenstein.”  The story is related by a young student, who creates a monstrous being from materials gathered in the tomb and the dissecting-room.  When the creature is made complete with bones, muscles, and skin, it acquires life and commits atrocious crimes.  It murders a friend of the student, strangles his bride, and finally comes to an end in the Northern seas.  While some parts of the story are written with considerable power, the general effect is exceedingly unpleasant.  Bulwer Lytton’s “Zanoni,” a peculiarly fanciful work, unfolds the mysteries of the Rosicrucians.  In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the freaks and vagaries of the imagination in sleep are vividly traced.  The curious mixture of the actual and the unreal, the merging of wholly different ideas in one conception, so frequent in dreams, are described with extraordinary skill and delicacy.  The childlike simplicity of Alice’s mind is charmingly maintained, and the exquisite vein of humor which runs through the whole book makes it one of the most delightful as well as one of the most remarkable of fictions.

X.

In an article published in The Ninteenth Century, Mr. Anthony Trollope expressed his views on the good and evil influences exerted by works of fiction, and he has repeated very much the same opinions in his interesting book on Thackeray.[212] “However poor your matter may be,” he says, “however near you may come to that ’foolishest of existing mortals,’ as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more or less influenced by what they find there.  And it is because the novelist amuses that he is thus influential.  The sermon too often has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of having it.  The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted unconsciously, and goes on its curative mission.  So it is with the novel.  It is taken because of its jam and honey.  But, unlike the honest, simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic.  There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous.  The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or affectation.  Without the lesson the amusement will not be there.  There are novels which certainly teach nothing; but then neither can