oisonous.
The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the
lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation.
Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels
which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any
one.

I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity
if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they
read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers
of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of
their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers,
and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the
schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He
is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself.
She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke,
throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do
into her task-work; and there she is taught,--how she shall learn to
love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should
advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw
herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young
man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion
of such tutorship. But he too will there learn either to speak the
truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real
manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanour
which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest
precepts.

At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now
from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost
indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel?
Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed,--this inner
confidence,--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what
thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend?
This, which it will certainly be his duty to consider with so much care,
will be the matter of his work. We know what was thought of such matter,
when Lydia in the play was driven to the necessity of flinging
"_Peregrine Pickle_ under the toilet," and thrusting "_Lord Aimwell_
under the sofa." We have got beyond that now, and are tolerabl