e pre-supposed when the newspaper becomes its
mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage-market had been told by
Thackeray, with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found
utterance in the columns of the "Times."

FOOTNOTE:

[22] "Or" in Green's text.

C. A CREATOR OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT

25. It may indeed be truly said that, after all, human selfishness is
much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that
riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel,
as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate
the effort to transcend the separations of place and circumstance; but
it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and
antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at
least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see
itself as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympathies
thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which oppression of
any kind, whether of one class by another, or of individuals by the
tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in vain.

D. A LEVELLER OF INTELLECTS

26. The novelist is a leveller also in another sense than that of which
we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as
situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest
natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption
of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the latter
much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from
novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher
seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises
from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd;
they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the
highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general
opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change
is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of
thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other
manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it
penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world
more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now
that political ideas and power are disseminated among the mass, and the
reason is recognised as belon