may feel
gratitude in looking back to the days when time hung heavier, and
letter-writing was a more serious business. The letters of those times
may recall the fearful and wonderful labours of tapestry in which ladies
employed their needles by way of killing time. The monuments of both
kinds are a fearful indication of the _ennui_ from which the
perpetrators must have suffered. We pity those who endured the toil as
we pity the prisoners whose patient ingenuity has carved a passage
through a stone wall with a rusty nail. Richardson's heroines, and his
heroes too, for that matter, would have been portents at any time. We
will take an example at hazard. Miss Byron, on March 22, writes a letter
of fourteen pages (in the old collective edition). The same day she
follows it up by two of six and of twelve pages respectively. On the
23rd she leads off with a letter of eighteen pages, and another of ten.
On the 24th she gives us two, filling together thirty pages, at the end
of which she remarks that she is _forced_ to lay down her pen, and then
adds a postscript of six more; on the 25th she confines herself to two
pages; but after a Sunday's rest she makes another start of equal
vigour. In three days, therefore, she covers ninety-six pages. Two of
the pages are about equal to three in this volume. Consequently, in
three days' correspondence, referring to the events of the day, she
would fill something like a hundred and forty-four of these pages--a
task the magnitude of which may be appreciated by anyone who will try
the experiment. We should say that she must have written for nearly
eight hours a day, and are not surprised at her remark, that she has on
one occasion only managed two hours' sleep.

It would, of course, be the height of pedantry to dwell upon this, as
though a fictitious personage were to be in all respects bounded by the
narrow limits of human capacity. It is not the object of a really good
novelist, nor does it come within the legitimate means of high art in
any department, to produce an actual illusion. Showmen in some foreign
palaces call upon us to admire paintings which we cannot distinguish
from bas-reliefs; the deception is, of course, a mere trick, and the
paintings are simply childish. On the stage we do not require to believe
that the scenery is really what it imitates, and the attempt to
introduce scraps of real life is a clear proof of a low artistic aim.
Similarly a novelist is not only justified