deal more tea in the pot.

There is, however, a cheap and delightful way of travelling, that a
man may perform in his easy-chair, without expense of passports or
post-boys. On the wings of a novel, from the next circulating library,
he sends his imagination a-gadding, and gains acquaintance with people
and manners whom he could not hope otherwise to know. Twopence a volume
bears us whithersoever we will;--back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or
to Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with Walter Scott; up the
heights of fashion with the charming enchanters of the silver-fork
school; or, better still, to the snug inn-parlor, or the jovial
tap-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller. I am sure
that a man who, a hundred years hence should sit down to write the
history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary
history of "Pickwick" aside as a frivolous work. It contains true
character under false names; and, like "Roderick Random," an inferior
work, and "Tom Jones" (one that is immeasurably superior), gives us a
better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather
from any more pompous or authentic histories.

We have, therefore, introduced into these volumes one or two short
reviews of French fiction writers, of particular classes, whose Paris
sketches may give the reader some notion of manners in that capital. If
not original, at least the drawings are accurate; for, as a Frenchman
might have lived a thousand years in England, and never could have
written "Pickwick," an Englishman cannot hope to give a good description
of the inward thoughts and ways of his neighbors.

To a person inclined to study these, in that light and amusing fashion
in which the novelist treats them, let us recommend the works of a new
writer, Monsieur de Bernard, who has painted actual manners, without
those monstrous and terrible exaggerations in which late French writers
have indulged; and who, if he occasionally wounds the English sense of
propriety (as what French man or woman alive will not?) does so more by
slighting than by outraging it, as, with their labored descriptions of
all sorts of imaginable wickedness, some of his brethren of the press
have done. M. de Bernard's characters are men and women of genteel
society--rascals enough, but living in no state of convulsive crimes;
and we follow him in his lively, malicious account of their manners,
without risk of lighting upon any such horr