igation deeper, we shall find that any such defect
violates our sense of artistic propriety, because it offends against our
healthy human instinct of the fundamental natural laws; and the artistic
merit, as well of a romance as of an epic, rises in proportion as the
plot is naturally developed, instead of being conducted to its solution
by a series of violent leaps and make-shifts, or even by a pretentious
sham. We shall take occasion hereafter to illustrate these views by
suitable examples.

That the work we are now considering fulfills, in a high degree, this
requirement of refined artistic feeling and artistic treatment, will be
at once apparent to all discriminating readers, though it can not be
denied that there are many of the higher and more delicate chords which
_Soll und Haben_ never strikes. The characters to whom we are introduced
appear to breathe a certain prosaic atmosphere, and the humorous and
comic scenes occasionally interwoven with the narrative bear no
comparison, in poetic delicacy of touch, with the creations of
Cervantes, nor yet with the plastic power of those of Fielding.

The author has given most evidence of poetic power in the delineation of
those dark characters who intrude like ghosts and demons upon the fair
and healthy current of the book, and vanish anon into the caverns and
cellars whence they came.

The great importance of the work, and the key to the almost unexampled
favor it has won, must be sought in a quite different direction--in the
close relation to the real and actual in our present social condition,
maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very
various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of
all alike is the same--to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative
more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the
complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The
poetic truthfulness of the immortal _Don Quixote_ lies not so much in
the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that
lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the
higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the
Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the
shattered Spanish people, among whom he moves with gipsies and smugglers
for companions, treading with all the freshness of imperishable youth
upon the buried ruins of political and