o the empty chamber! Taken to a
hideous sort of charnel-house, Adrian is shown the body of a female clad
in a mantle that had once been Irene's, and concludes that it is the
corpse of her who, for the last three days and nights, has been tending
on him. I recollect that, when I came to this part of the novel, I threw
the book down, and stalked for five minutes indignantly about the room,
exclaiming that it was cruel--barbarous--savage, to be sporting thus
with human sympathies. To be sure, I ought to add, in justice to the
author, that, after exhaling my rage in this manner, I again took up the
novel, and read on to the end.

I do beseech you, Eugenius, do not give us a _philosophical_ novel.
Every work of art of a high order will, in one sense of the word, be
philosophical; there will be philosophy there for those who can
penetrate it, and sometimes the reader will gather a profounder and
juster meaning, than the author himself detected in his fiction. I mean,
of course, those works where some theory or some dogma is expressly
taught, where a vein of scholastic, or political, or ethical matter
alternates with a vein of narrative and fictitious matter. I dislike the
whole genus. Either one is interested in your story, and then your
philosophy is a bore; or one is not interested in it, and then your
philosophy can gain no currency by being tacked to it. Suppose the
narrative and didactic portions of such a book equally good, it is still
essentially two books in one, and should be read once for the story, and
once without. We are repeatedly told that people are induced to peruse,
in the shape of a novel, what they would have avoided as dry and
uninteresting in the shape of an essay. Pray, can you get people to take
knowledge, as you get children to take physic, without knowing what it
is they swallow? So that the powder was in the jelly, and the jelly goes
down the throat, the business, in the one case, is done. But I rather
think, in gaining knowledge, one must _taste the powder;_ there is no
help for it. Really, the manner in which these good nurses of the public
talk of passing off their wisdom upon us, reminds us of the old and
approved fashion in which Paddy passes his bad shilling, by slipping it
between two sound penny pieces. To be sure it is but twopence after all,
and he gets neither more nor less than his twopenny-worth of
intoxication, but he has succeeded in putting his shilling into
circulation. Just such a