In the serious class
of novels, the hero was usually

A knight of love, who never broke a vow.

And although, in those of a more humorous cast, he was permitted a
licence, borrowed either from real life or from the libertinism of the
drama, still a distinction was demanded even from Peregrine Pickle, or
Tom Jones; and the hero, in every folly of which he might be guilty, was
studiously vindicated from the charge of infidelity of the heart. The
heroine was, of course, still more immaculate; and to have conferred her
affections upon any other than the lover to whom the reader had destined
her from their first meeting, would have been a crime against sentiment
which no author, of moderate prudence, would have hazarded, under the
old _regime_.

Here, therefore, we have two essentials and important circumstances, in
which the earlier novels differed from those now in fashion, and were
more nearly assimilated to the old romances. And there can be no doubt
that, by the studied involution and extrication of the story, by the
combination of incidents new, striking and wonderful beyond the course
of ordinary life, the former authors opened that obvious and strong
sense of interest which arises from curiosity; as by the pure, elevated,
and romantic cast of the sentiment, they conciliated those better
propensities of our nature which loves to contemplate the picture of
virtue, even when confessedly unable to imitate its excellences.

But strong and powerful as these sources of emotion and interest may be,
they are, like all others, capable of being exhausted by habit. The
imitators who rushed in crowds upon each path in which the great masters
of the art had successively led the way, produced upon the public mind
the usual effect of satiety. The first writer of a new class is, as it
were, placed on a pinnacle of excellence, to which, at the earliest
glance of a surprised admirer, his ascent seems little less than
miraculous. Time and imitation speedily diminish the wonder, and each
successive attempt establishes a kind of progressive scale of ascent
between the lately deified author, and the reader, who had deemed his
excellence inaccessible. The stupidity, the mediocrity, the merit of his
imitators, are alike fatal to the first inventor, by showing how
possible it is to exaggerate his faults and to come within a certain
point of his beauties.

Materials also (and the man of genius as well as his wretched imitator
must work