one school was
produced by the reaction of the human mind against the other; genius,
tired of the eternal flirtations of guardsmen and right honourables,
sought for unsophisticated nature in the humour of low or the sorrows of
humble life. But low and humble life are sophisticated just as much as
elevated and fashionable; and, if we are driven to a selection, we would
prefer the artificial manners of the great to the natural effusions of the
vulgar. We would rather, as the child said to the ogress, be eat up by the
gentleman. But true novel-writing should be devoted to neither the one nor
the other. It should aim at the representation of what Sir Joshua Reynolds
called "general or common nature"--that is, nature by its general
features, which are common to all ages and countries, not its
peculiarities in a particular circle or society. It is by success in
delineating that, and _by it alone_, that lasting fame is to be acquired.
Without doubt every age and race of men have their separate dress end
costume, and the mind has its externals as well as the body, which the
artist of genius will study with sedulous care, and imitate with
scrupulous fidelity. But the soul is not in the dress; and so it will be
found in the delineation of mind as in the representation of the figure.

All these extravagances in the noble art of romance originate in one
cause. They come of not making "the past and the _distant_ predominate
over the present." It is like sketching every day from nature in the same
scenery or country: the artist, if he has the pencil of Claude Lorraine or
Salvator Rosa, will, in the end, find that if the _objects_ of his study
are endless, their _character_ has a certain family resemblance; and that,
if he is not repeating the same study, he is reproducing, under different
forms, the same ideas. But let him extend his observation to a wider
sphere: let him study the sublimity of mountain or the sweetness of
pastoral scenery, let him traverse the Alps and the Apennines, the
Pyrenees or the Caucasus; let him inhale the spirit of antiquity amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, or the genius of Greece on the rocks of the
Acropolis; let him become embued with modern beauty on the shores of
Naples, or the combined charms of Europe and Asia amidst the intricacies
of the Bosphorus--and what a world of true images, objects, and beauties
is at once let into his mind! It is the same with romance. It is by
generalizing ideas, by means