d. . . .

'Independently of all the advantages, which I as an individual
received from my father's constant course of literary instruction,
this was of considerable utility in another and less selfish point
of view. My father called upon all the family to hear and judge of
all we were writing. The taste for literature, and for judging of
literary composition, was by this means formed and exercised in a
large family, including a succession of nine or ten children, who
grew up during the course of these twenty-five years. Stories of
children exercised the judgment of children, and so on in proportion
to their respective ages, all giving their opinions, and trying
their powers of criticism fearlessly and freely. . . .

'He would sometimes advise me to lay by what was done for several
months, and turn my mind to something else, that we might look back
at it afterwards with fresh eyes. . . .

'I may mention, because it leads to a general principle of
criticism, that, in many cases, the attempt to join truth and
fiction did not succeed: for instance, Mr. Day's educating Sabrina
for his wife suggested the story of Virginia and Clarence Hervey in
"Belinda." But to avoid representing the real character of Mr. Day,
which I did not think it right to draw, I used the incident with
fictitious characters, which I made as unlike the real persons as I
possibly could. My father observed to me afterwards that, in this
and other instances, the very circumstances that were taken from
real life are those that have been objected to as improbable or
impossible; for this, as he showed me, there are good and sufficient
reasons. In the first place, anxiety to avoid drawing the characters
that were to be blameable or ridiculous from any individuals in real
life, led me to apply whatever circumstances were taken from reality
to characters quite different from those to whom the facts had
occurred; and consequently, when so applied, they were unsuitable
and improbable: besides, as my father remarked the circumstances
which in real life fix the attention, because they are out of the
common course of events, are for this very reason unfit for the
moral purposes, as well as for the dramatic effect of fiction. The
interest we take in hearing an uncommon fact often depends on our
belief in its truth. Introduce it into fiction, and this interest
ceases, the reader stops to question the truth or probability of the
narrative, the illusion and the dramat