ovelist has
undertaken to gratify.

Under the extensive head of the novel of life and manners, the habits,
modes of thought, and peculiarities of language of Scotland, Ireland,
England, and the United States, with many sub-divisions of provinces
and cities, have been studied and described. The novelist has extended
his investigations into Eastern countries, and has portrayed the
customs and institutions of Oriental life. He has taken his characters
from historic times, and has recommended the past for the instruction
or amusement of the present. The experience of the soldier and the
sailor have taken their place among the incidents of fiction; the
adventures and crimes of blacklegs and convicts have been drawn upon to
gratify palates sated with the weak _pabulum_ of the fashionable novel.

Fiction has not been confined to the study of manners and character,
but has been extensively used to propagate opinions and to argue
causes. Novels have been written in support of religious views,
Catholic, High-Church, and Low-Church; political novels have supported
the interests of Tory, Whig, anti-slavery, and civil service;
philosophical novels have exposed the evils of society as at present
constituted, and have built up impossible utopias. Besides the novel of
purpose, there has been the novel of fancy, in which the imagination
has been allowed to soar unchecked in the regions of the unreal and the
supernatural.

With so great a variety of works of fiction, it is not surprising to
find a corresponding variety of authorship. Lords and ladies, generals
and colonels have entered the lists against police court reporters and
female adventurers. The novel is no longer the exclusive work of a
professional author. Amateurs have attempted it to pass the time which
hung heavily on their hands; to put into form their dreams or
experiences; to gratify a mere literary vanity. The needy nobleman has
made profitable use of his name on the title-page of a novel purporting
to give information concerning fashionable life. But the most
remarkable characteristic of novel-writing has been the important part
taken by women. They have adopted fiction as their special department
of literature, and have shown their capacity for it by the production
of novels which fully equal in number and almost equal in merit the
works of their masculine rivals. On her own ground, George Eliot has no
superior, while the writings of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth