pleasure
than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no
species of composition has been so much decried. From pride,
ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers;
and while the abilities of the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth
abridger of the history of England are eulogised by a thousand
pens, there seems a general agreement to slight the performances
which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.'

I had quite forgotten till I came upon this passage that Miss Austen
had such 'a kick in her,' and I remember how I honoured her for it and
sympathised with her sentiments. 'When pain and anguish wring the
brow,' we all know who is the comforter; but next to her, and when the
brow is getting a little better, we welcome the novelist.

With our face aslant on the pillow, we once more make acquaintance with
the characters that have been the delight of our youth, and find they
delight us still, but with a difference. The animal spirits of Smollett
and Fielding are a little too much for us; there is not sympathy enough
in them for our own condition; they seem to have been fellows who were
never ill. Perhaps 'Humphrey Clinker,' though it drags at the end, and
the political disquisitions are intolerable, is the funniest book that
ever was written; but the faculty of appreciation for it is not now in
us. We turn with relief to Scott, though not to 'Scott's Works,' in the
sense in which the phrase is generally used, as though they were a
foundry from which everything is issued of the same workmanship and
excellence; whereas there is as much difference between them as there
was in her Majesty's ships of old between the gallant seventy-four and
the crazy troopship. The invalid, however, as I have said, is far from
critical; he only knows what he likes. Judged by this fastidious
standard, he finds 'Waverley' somewhat wearisome, and, as to the first
part of it in particular, wonders, not that the Great Unknown should
have kept it in his desk for years as a comparative failure, but that
he should have ever taken it from that repository. 'The Antiquary,'
which in health he used to admire, or think he did, exceedingly, has
also a narcotic effect; but 'Rob Roy' revives him, and 'Ivanhoe' stirs
him like a trumpet-call.

What is very curious, just as the favourite literature of a cripple is
almost always that which treats of force and action, so upon our
sick-bed we turn most gladly