in which he lost his life at five and twenty. In this short account of Eugenio you have the history of many young men of this age, who are bewitched with the ideas of liberty and pleasure; but with this difference, that some are destroyed by others, and some destroy themselves.

The progress is much the same with a nation as with an individual; when they rise from poverty, activity, and industry, to improvement, ease, and elegance, they sink into indolence and luxury, which bring on a fever and delirium, till having quarrelled among themselves, and turned their swords against one another, they fall by a sort of political suicide, or become a prey to some foreign enemy.

LETTER V.

ON NOVELS.

WHEN you read for amusement, let your mind be turned as much as possible to the real transactions of human life, as they are represented and commented upon by wise and faithful historians; and beware of throwing away your time, as too many now do, by giving yourself up to trifling works of imagination, of which there is a deluge in the present age, to the subversion of common sense, and the general corruption of our principles and morals.

While I was in the shop of a sensible bookseller in the country, a young man presented himself, who came for some volumes of a novel. As soon as he turned his back, "Sir (said the bookseller), our trade

is now in a manner reduced to this one article of letting out novels; that young man has read half the novels in my collection; and when he has finished his studies, by reading the other half, the ignorance he brought into my shop would have done him more good than the knowledge he will carry out of it. Many other occurrences have led me to reflect on this fashion, which has increased so much of late years, as nearly to swallow up all other reading; like the lean kine of Pharaoh, which swallowed up all the fat ones, and did not look the better for it.

Consider therefore, before your judgment is corrupted, that most novels are exceedingly lean in their matter, to say the best of them. Many of them are the cold productions of people who write for the fashion (with as much indifference as milliners make caps) without any materials worth communicating. Others are the offspring of a rambling fancy, which puts together a string of incidents, not one degree above the tea-table, and of no more real concern than if they were to hold you by the ears as some tiresome people do, with an account of their dreams; indeed many of them are but the waking dreams of those who know neither the world nor themselves. Many of them also are mean imitations, which affect the style and manner of more successful compositions. Some of them are void of all regular design, and made up of heterogeneous parts, which have no dependence upon one another.

-latè qui splendeat unus et alter

Assuitur pannus

And thus they become like the party-coloured jacket of a fool upon the stage of a mountebank, who sets the

rabble a-gape with the low and insipid wonders he has collected, to detain them in his company, and draw the money out of their pockets.

It were well if the reading of novels were nothing worse than the loss of time and money, though this is bad enough: but young people will not escape so; it has generally a bad effect upon the mind, and in some instances, a fatal effect upon the morals and fortune. In novels, plays, and romances, (for they all have the same general object, which is amusement) good and evil are disguised by false colourings and unjust representations. The end is, to please; and how is this end to be obtained? Nothing will please loose people but intrigues and loose adventures; nothing will please the unlettered profligate but blasphemous sneers upon religion and the holy Scriptures; nothing will please the vicious but the palliation of vice and the contempt of virtue; therefore novelists and comic writers who study popularity, either for praise or profit, mix up vice with amiable qualities, to cover and recommend it, while virtue is compounded with such ingredients as have a natural tendency to make it odious. These tricks are put upon the public every day, and they take those for their benefactors who thus impose upon them.

But novels vitiate the taste while they corrupt the manners; through a desire of captivating the imagination, they fly above nature and reality; their characters are all overcharged, and their incidents boil over with improbabilities and absurdities. The imagination thus fed with wind and flatulence, loses its relish for truth, and can bear nothing that is ordinary; so that the reading of novels is to the mind what dram-drinking is to the body; the palate is vitiated, the stomach is squeamish, the juices are corrupted, the digestion is

spoiled, and life can be kept up only by that which is supernatural and violent. The gamester who accustoms himself to violent agitations, can find no pleasure unless his passions are all kept upon the stretch, like the rigging of a ship in a storm; his amusement is in racks, tortures, and even madness itself; and such is the taste of those who habituate their imaginations to the flights and extravagances of modern romances. It is a certain proof that a nation is become degenerate in sense, in learning, in œconomy, in morals and in religion, when they are running thus after shadows, and neglecting all that is useful and valuable in life. The polite author of the Travels of Cyrus, describing the state of the Medes when their empire was declining, gives a lively picture of that literary corruption, which is the never-failing attendant upon luxury and a dissolution of morals: "Solid knowledge was looked upon as contrary to delicacy of manners; agreeable trifling, fine-spun thoughts, and lively sallies of imagination, were the only kinds of wit admired there; no sort of writing pleased but amusing fictions, where a perpetual succession of events surprised with their variety, without improving the understanding, or ennobling the heart."

I have sometimes been struck with the reflection, that few writers, who forge a series of events, look upon their attempt in a serious light, and consider the hazard of the undertaking; how they are in continual danger of giving us false notions of the consequences of human actions, and of misrepresenting the ways of Divine Providence; for the ways of men, so far as they are passive under the consequences of their own actions, are the ways of God. When we confine ourselves to real life, and are content with describing facts, with the consequences that actually followed

ness.

them, we may be unable to trace the designs of Providence, but then we do not misrepresent them; and the time will come when God will be justified in all those complicated events, which we are unable now to reconcile with the known laws of justice and goodBut when we dare to settle the fate of imaginary characters, we take the providence of God out of his hands, assuming an office for which no man is fit, and in which he cannot miscarry without some danger to himself and others. For example; a writer may even mean well, and yet through short-sightedness and mistake, may bring virtue into distress under such circumstances as Providence, perhaps, never did nor will, and thereby may bring discouragements upon virtue, and even throw it into despair; he may give to vice that success which it never had, nor will have, so long as God governs the world.

To counterbalance this danger, Lord Bacon observes that," in works of imagination there is liberty of representing virtue and vice in their proper colours with their proper rewards; and to correct as it were the common course of things, and satisfy the principles of justice, by which the mind of a reader is influenced." In this respect, works of genius have an advantage above real history, and may be admitted, provided the writer himself is of sound judgment, and influenced by principles of truth and justice.

If, when you have weighed these things together, you should suspect that I have been too nice and severe, consider that it is better to err on the side of caution and prudence; and that I may say for myself what the apostle said upon a like occasion, I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy.

Upon the whole, life is a serious thing, and all events are at God's disposal: and as the good and