they amuse any one.  I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they read.  Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching:  fathers of the examples which they set:  and schoolmasters of the influence of their instructions.  Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers, schoolmasters!  But the novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother.  He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself.  She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do into her task-work; and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw herself at once into this new delight.  It is the same with the young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion of such tutorship.  But he, too, will there learn either to speak the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanor which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest precepts.”

Such are the views of a close observer of human nature, whose works have had an exceedingly wide and an always excellent influence.  While Mr. Trollope has probably exaggerated the educational power of the novel, it cannot be denied that this form of literature takes a considerable part in moulding the opinions and standards of the young.  The impressions of life derived from novels are almost as strong as those we receive from what is passing in the world about us.  If a work of fiction form a truthful reflection of nature, it must hold up to the reader’s view examples of evil as well as examples of good; it must deal with depravity as well as with virtue.  And, therefore, all that can be expected from the novelist is that he should endeavor to represent life as it is, with its due apportionment of beauty and of ugliness.  And so much is demanded not only by the moralist, but by the critic.  Many writers who have described the life of criminals, who have endeavored to make infamous careers attractive, and have pandered to the lower tastes of the reading public, would urge in their own defence:  that they have nothing to do with morality; that their object is to produce a work of art; that no question of the good or evil effect of their writing should be allowed to trammel their imagination.  But the critic would rightly reply, that truth at least must be respected in a work of art; that the imagination must not be allowed the liberty of misrepresentation; and that the novelist in whose pages vice predominates, or is given an alluring