the author and the friends or foes he depicts, is amply compensated
for by the enthusiasm appertaining to new discoveries, as each
character reveals itself, often in quite unforeseen manner, and the
consequences of each event shape themselves inevitably and sometimes
indeed almost against his will._

_Although dissimilar in their genesis, both kinds of stories can, in
the telling, be equally life-like and equally alluring to the reader.
But what of the writer? Among his literary family is there not one
nearer his heart than all the rest--his_ dream-child? _It may be the
stoutest of the breed or it may be the weakling; it may be the
first-born, it often is the Benjamin. Fathers in the flesh know this
secret tenderness. Many a child and many a book is brooded over with a
special love even before its birth.--Loved thus, for no grace or merit
of its own, this book is my dream-child._

* * * * *

_Here, by the way, I should like to say my word in honour of
_Fiction_--"fiction" contradistinguished from what is popularly termed
"serious" writing._

_If, in a story, the characters and the events are truly convincing;
if the former are appealingly human and the latter are so carefully
devised and described as never to evoke the idea of improbability,
then it can make no difference in the_ intellectual pleasure _of the
reader whether what he is made to realise so vividly is a record of
fact or of mere fancy. Facts we read of are of necessity past: what is
past, what is beyond the immediate ken of our senses, can only be
realised in imagination; and the picture we are able to make of it for
ourselves depends altogether on the sympathetic skill of the recorder.
Is not Diana Vernon, born and bred in Scott's imagination, to the full
as living now before us as Rob Roy Macgregor whose existence was so
undeniably tangible to the men of his days? Do we not see, in our
mind's eye, and know as clearly the lovable "girt John Ridd" of_ Lorna
Doone _the romance as his contemporaries, Mr. Samuel Pepys of the hard
and uncompromising_ Diary _or King James of_ English Annals?

_Pictures, alike of the plainest facts or of the veriest imaginings,
are but pictures: it matters very little therefore whether the man or
the woman we read of but never can see in the flesh has really lived
or not, if what we do read raises an emotion in our hearts. To the
novelist, every character, each in his own degree, is almost as