cending to notice a novel; when they felt themselves bound in
dignity to deprecate the suspicion of paying much regard to such
trifles, and pleaded the necessity of occasionally stooping to humour
the taste of their fair readers. The delights of fiction, if not more
keenly or more generally relished, are at least more readily
acknowledged by men of sense and taste; and we have lived to hear the
merits of the best of this class of writings earnestly discussed by some
of the ablest scholars and soundest reasoners of the present day.

We are inclined to attribute this change, not so much to an alteration
in the public taste, as in the character of the productions in question.
Novels may not, perhaps, display more genius now than formerly, but they
contain more solid sense; they may not afford higher gratification, but
it is of a nature which men are less disposed to be ashamed of avowing.
We remarked, in a former Number, in reviewing a work of the author now
before us, that "a new style of novel has arisen, within the last
fifteen or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon
which the interest hinges; neither alarming our credulity nor amusing
our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of
romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain
attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among
those who actually live and die. The substitute for these excitements,
which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious
use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in
the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the
splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking
representation of that which is daily taking place around him."

Now, though the origin of this new school of fiction may probably be
traced, as we there suggested, to the exhaustion of the mines from which
materials for entertainment had been hitherto extracted, and the
necessity of gratifying the natural craving of the reader for variety,
by striking into an untrodden path; the consequences resulting from this
change have been far greater than the mere supply of this demand. When
this Flemish painting, as it were, is introduced--this accurate and
unexaggerated delineation of events and characters--it necessarily
follows, that a novel, which makes good its pretensions of giving a
perfectly correct picture of common life,