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rature has a tendency to produce ? Is it all hurtful, or all 

 beneficial, or is it partly both ? Like almost everything of 

 the kind, its tendencies are both good and evil ; but I 

 should say, on the whole, injurious. 



" One of its advantages is, that by means of fiction we 

 can represent examples of any particular kind, and thus 

 give to the teaching of abstract principles a degree of 

 definitiveness and form winch they would not otherwise 

 possess. How many of our own impressions exist in the 

 mind simply as impressions ! We cannot tell how they 

 came there, but we know that they exist : the trains of 

 reasoning by which they are fixed, or the examples by which 

 they were made vivid, have long disappeared, and only the 

 results remain. Hence it is, that, on the impulse of the 

 moment, not one man in twenty can give an appropriate 

 illustration of a principle with which he is familiar every 

 hour ; and, without these illustrations, our impressions can 

 never be accurately conveyed to others. Now, the Novel 

 presents peculiar facilities for doing this without at all 

 violating the chain of probabilities ; for in the world every 

 character is so mixed up with the circumstances which sur- 

 round him, that it is often impossible to separate him from 

 them, and it is more convenient to strike out a totally new 

 character, which can be moulded at the author's pleasure. 

 In this way there are Novels which illustrate such principles 

 as the following : — The secret of being always satisfied, — 

 honesty is the best policy, — the folly of pride, — the miseries 

 of a guilty conscience, — the horrors of war, — the importance 

 of education, — and the dangers of an ill-regulated temper. 

 It does not always follow that the moral, even of a fable, is 

 seen by a juvenile reader, and he is much less likely to see 

 it in a large book ; but he reads for the story ; and who 

 does not know that ' Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress' and 

 ' Swift's Gulliver's Travels' are among the most interesting 

 story books in the language? 



