ed,
of extraordinary range, sanity, and insight; yet sometimes singularly
stunted and limited in respect of the greatest things, and--one has to
say it, though there is no need to stir the mud as it has been stirred[264]
--something of a "porker of Epicurus."

Now, with such additional light as this sketch may furnish, let us
return to the book itself. I have said that it has been pronounced
"uninteresting," and it must be confessed that, in some ways, the author
has done all he could to make it so. In the first place it is much too
long; he has neglected the examples of _Rene_ and _Adolphe_, and given
nearly four hundred solid and closely packed pages to a story with very
little incident, very little description, only one solidly presented
character, and practically no conversation. There is hardly a novel
known to me from which the disadvantages of some more or less mechanical
fault of presentation--often noticed in this _History_--could be better
illustrated than from _Volupte_. I have called the pages "solid," and
they are so in more than the general, more even than the technical
printer's sense. One might imagine that the author had laid a wager
that he would use the smallest number of paragraph-breaks possible.
There are none at all till page 6 (the fourth of the actual book);
blocks of the same kind occur constantly afterwards, and more than one,
or at most two, "new pars" are very rare indeed on a page. Even such
conversation as there is is not extracted from the matrix of narrative,
and the whole is unbroken _recit_.

It may seem that there is, and has been elsewhere, too much stress laid
upon this point. But if I, who am something of a _helluo librorum_, and
very seldom find anything that resists my devouring faculty, feel this
difficulty, how much more must persons who require to be tempted and
baited on by mechanical and formal allurements?

Still, some strong-minded person may say: "These are 'shallows and
miseries'--base mechanical considerations. Tell me _why_ the book, as
matter, has been found uninteresting." In this instance there will be no
difficulty in complying with the request. Let me at once say that I do
not consider it uninteresting myself; that, in fact (and stronger
testimony is hardly possible), after reading great part of it without
appetite and "against the grain," I began to take a very considerable
interest in it. But this did not prevent my having a pretty clear notion
of what seem t