, but not, as it
happened, read at the time of their appearance. I am indeed inclined to
lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps,
as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of
reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read
again in the book. The late Mr. Mark Pattison was not a friend of mine,
and we once had a pitched battle; nor was he in any case given to borrow
other people's expressions. But he was a critic, if he was anything, and
he once did me the honour to repeat _verbatim_--whether consciously or
not I cannot say, but in the very periodical where it had originally
appeared--a sentence of mine about "people who would rather read any
circulating-library trash, for the first time, than _Pendennis_ or
_Pride and Prejudice_ for the second." I think this difference between
the two classes is as worthy to rank, among the criteria of opposed
races of mankind and womankind, as those between borrowers and lenders,
Platonists and Aristotelians, or Big- and Little-Endians.

But the vast library through which I have had the privilege of
conducting my readers does not exercise any invidious separation between
the two. I have read a good many French novels--hundreds certainly, I do
not know that it would be preposterous to say thousands--that I have not
even mentioned in this book.[566] But I have been a very busy man, and
have had to read and to do a great many other things. If I had had
nothing else to do and had devoted my entire life to the occupation
which Gray thought not undesirable as regards Marivaux and Crebillon, I
doubt whether I could have "overtaken," as the Scotch say, the entire
prose fiction of 1800-1900 in French. On the back of one of the volumes
of fiction--itself pretty obscure--which I have noticed in Chapter II.
of this volume, I find advertised the works of a certain Dinocourt, of
whom I never heard before, and who is not to be found in at least some
tolerably full French dictionaries of literature. They have quite
appetising titles (one or two given in the passage referred to), and
there are in all sixty-two volumes of them, distributed in fours, fives,
and sixes among the several works. Ought I to have read these sixty odd
volumes of Dinocourt? That is a moral question. That there _are_ sixty
odd volumes of him, probably not now very easily obtainable, but
somewhere for some one to read if he likes, is a simple fact. And there