On Novels.
(Two pages written in a Lady’s Album.1)

A false ridicule has settled upon Novels, and upon Young Ladies as the readers of novels. Love, we are told authoritatively, has not that importance in the actual practice of life—nor that extensive influence upon human affairs—which novel-writers postulate, and which the interest of novels presumes. Something to this effect has been said by an eminent writer; and the law is generally laid down upon these principles by cynical old men, and envious blue-stockings who have outlived their personal attractions. The sentiment however is false even for the present condition of society; and it will become continually more false as society improves. For what is the great commanding event, the one sole revolution, in a woman’s life? Marriage. Viewing her course from the cradle to the grave in the light of a drama, I am entitled to say that her wedding-day is its catastrophe—or, in technical language, its peripeteia: whatever else is important to her in succeeding years has its origin in that event. So much for that sex. For the other, it is admitted that Love is not, in the same exclusive sense, the governing principle under which their lives move: but what then are the concurrent forces, which sometimes happen to coöperate with that agency—but more frequently disturb it? They are two; Ambition, and Avarice. Now for the vast majority of men—Ambition, or the passion for personal distinction, has too narrow a stage of action, its grounds of hope are too fugitive and unsteady, to furnish any durable or domineering influence upon the course of life. Avarice again is so repulsive to the native nobility of the human heart, that it rarely obtains the dignity of a passion: great energy of character is requisite to form a consistent and accomplished miser: and of the mass of men it may be said—that, if the beneficence of nature has in some measure raised them above avarice by the necessity of those social instincts which she has impressed upon their hearts, in some measure also they sink below it by their deficiencies in that austerity of self-denial and that savage strength of will which are indispensable qualifications for the rôle of heroic miser. A perfect miser in fa............