echo in the general mind, and awakens
associations of general interest in the breast of the audience. It is the
same with the historical romance. It may and should deviate a little from
the circle of interesting association generally felt; but it should be
_but a little_. The heart of the readers of novels, as well as the
spectators of tragedies, is at home. The images, the emotions, the loves,
the hatreds, the hopes, the fears, the names, the places familiar to our
youth, are those which awaken the strongest emotions of sympathy in later
years. Novelty is frequently felt as agreeable; but it is so chiefly when
it recalls again in other climes, or in the events of other ages, the
feelings and passions of our own. We like occasionally to leave home; but
when we do so, there is nothing so delightful as to be recalled to it by
the touching of any of those secret chords which bind man to the place of
his nativity, or the scene of his dearest associations. The novels which
are to be durably popular in any country must be founded, not indeed
necessarily on incidents of its own story, but on the ideas with which it
is familiar, and on incidents cousin-german at least to those of its own
national existence. The institutions of chivalry, the feudal system, have
created, as it were, in this respect one great family of the European
nations, which renders, at least to the educated classes, the manners,
emotions, and passions of the higher ranks an object of universal
interest. We can sympathise as warmly with the paladins of Ariosto, or the
knights of Tasso, as ever could the troubadours of Provence or the nobles
of Italy. But if this lofty circle which forms the manners of chivalry is
once passed, we descend to inferior grades of society. The novelist of
every country will find, that what he portrays will not permanently or
generally interest a wider circle than that of its own inhabitants. We can
take no interest in the boyards of Russia or the boors of Poland; but
little in the agas and kuzilbashes of Eastern story. Novelty, as in the
_Arabian Nights_, may attract in youth for a single publication; but fairy
or Eastern tales will never form the intellectual bread of life. The
universal admiration with which _Don Quixote_ and the Waverley novels are
regarded over the whole world, must not blind us to the extreme difficulty
of making the manners of the middle or lower ranks, if brought forward as
the main machinery of a romance, dur