eyond the first attitude, the first _pose_ of
your hero? If so, I doubt of your aptitude for the novel. I know that
you have some noble ideas of elevating the standard of the romance, and,
by retarding and subduing the interest of the narrative, to make this
combine with more elaborate beauties, and more subtle thought, that has
been hitherto considered as legitimately appertaining to the novel. I
like the idea--I should rejoice to see it executed; but pardon me, if
the very circumstance of you being possessed with this idea, leads me to
augur ill of you as a writer of fiction. You have not love enough for
your story, nor sufficient confidence in it. You are afraid of every
sentence which has in it no peculiar beauty of diction or of sentiment.
A novelist must be liberal of letter-press, must feel no remorse at
leading us down, page after page, destitute of all other merit than that
of conducting us to his _denouement_: he writes not by sentences; takes
no account of paragraphs; he strides from chapter to chapter, from
volume to volume.

"Verily," I think I hear you say, "you are the most consolatory of
counsellors; you advise me to commence with the drama--but with no
prospect of success--in order to prepare myself for a failure in the
novel!"

My dear Eugenius, you shall not fail. You shall write a very powerful,
exciting, affecting romance. Pray, do not be too severe upon our
sensibilities, do not put us on the rack more than is absolutely
necessary. It has always seemed to me--and I am glad to have this
opportunity of unburdening my heart upon the point--it has always seemed
to me, that there was something _barbarous_ in that torture of the
sympathies in which the novelist delights, and which his reader, it must
be supposed, finds peculiarly grateful. It really reminds me of that
pleasure which certain savages are said to take in cutting themselves
with knives, and inflicting other wounds upon themselves when in a state
of great excitement. I have myself often flung away the work of fiction,
when it seemed bent upon raising my sympathies only to torture them.
Pray, spare us when you, in your time, shall have become a potent
magician. Follow the example of the poets, who, when they bear the
sword, yet hide it in such a clustre of laurels that its sharpness is
not seen.

To take very common instance--All the world knows that the catastrophe
of a romance must be inevitably postponed, that suspense must be
prolonged