up for the three quaint old
ladies, as for old offenders whose persistence had won the wink of
toleration. They actually achieved a certain factitious respectability
in comparison with the fresher and more active dangers afforded by the
Novel. But the Novel was simply a combination of all three, more
flexible and adaptable. It, therefore, merely shares in the old
judgment directed against everything in literature--and in all the
arts--that displays the seductiveness of fancy or taste. The judgments
of public opinion have been consistently in the line of distrusting
and discrediting everything that appeared to be purely spiritual and
intellectual, and that could not at once be organized into a political
or religious institution or into a mechanical industry with the
prospect of large sales and quick profits.

Novel-reading is a vice, then, under this judgment, just as the
reading of all fictions, fancies, inventions, and romances in all
their forms, poetic, dramatic, and narrative. And if the reading is a
vice the writing of them, in all common sense, can be no less than
murder or arson. If it is a vice to devote time to the reading of
novels it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit by
the vice. And if all this is true, what a wonderfully attractive
corner that must be in Hades where are old Homer and the ever young
Aristophanes, Sophocles and AEschylus, Dante, Virgil and Boccaccio,
Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Hugo, Balzac and Thackeray, Scott
and Dumas, Dickens and that wonderful child of Bohemia, who lately lay
down to rest on Vailima mountain. Think of all these marvelous eons of
genius gathered together for their meet punishment! In one especially
warm corner, perhaps, Lope Felix de Vega, the most incorrigible of
all, slowly expiating upon some most ingeniously uncomfortable
gridiron the 1,160 volumes of crime and vice that are to be set down
against him in the indictment, if it be a true bill. We may wonder
whether the unknown authors of "Esther" and "The Song of Songs" and
the psychological novel of "Job" are there, too, where they properly
belong. It must be a great congress with these chief criminals as the
senators and a lower house made up of the most agreeably vicious souls
of earth, who, in their sojourn here, yielded for a moment to siren
voices. If everything in fiction--from the astonishing conspiracies
overthrown by "Old Sleuth" to the magnificent visions that old John
Milton saw