fe, that though he may perhaps feel some
disrelish for the tameness of the scene before him, compared with the
fairy-land he has been visiting, yet at least his judgment will not be
depraved, nor his expectations misled; he will not apprehend a meeting
with Algerine banditti on English shores, nor regard the old woman who
shews him about an antique country seat, as either an enchantress or the
keeper of an imprisoned damsel. But it is otherwise with those fictions
which differ from common life in little or nothing but the improbability
of the occurrences: the reader is insensibly led to calculate upon some
of those lucky incidents and opportune coincidences of which he has been
so much accustomed to read, and which, it is undeniable, _may_ take
place in real life; and to feel a sort of confidence, that however
romantic his conduct may be, and in whatever difficulties it may involve
him, all will be sure to come right at last, as is invariably the case
with the hero of a novel.

On the other hand, so far as these pernicious effects fail to be
produced, so far does the example lose its influence, and the exercise
of poetical justice is rendered vain. The reward of virtuous conduct
being brought about by fortunate accidents, he who abstains (taught,
perhaps, by bitter disappointments) from reckoning on such accidents,
wants that encouragement to virtue, which alone has been held out to
him. "If I were _a man in a novel_," we remember to have heard an
ingenious friend observe, "I should certainly act so and so, because I
should be sure of being no loser by the most heroic self-devotion and of
ultimately succeeding in the most daring enterprises."

It may be said, in answer, that these objections apply only to the
_unskilful_ novelist, who, from ignorance of the world, gives an
unnatural representation of what he professes to delineate. This is
partly true, and partly not; for there is a distinction to be made
between the _unnatural_ and the merely _improbable_: a fiction is
unnatural when there is some assignable reason against the events taking
place as described,--when men are represented as acting contrary to the
character assigned them, or to human nature in general; as when a young
lady of seventeen, brought up in ease, luxury and retirement, with no
companions but the narrow-minded and illiterate, displays (as a heroine
usually does) under the most trying circumstances, such wisdom,
fortitude, and knowledge of the wo