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hour over a narrative of the sufferings of Oliver Twist, 

 though if the same poor child presented himself to her as 

 he was, cold, shivering, hungry, beaten, and ragged, she 

 would probably order his instant dismissal from the pre- 

 mises, as a sight too disagreeable for her delicate nerves. I 

 allude rather to the fact noticed by Babbage, that the Eng- 

 lish nation is becoming, as a whole, a nation of novel 

 readers. Thus, a book which has cost the writer a month's 

 exertion will bring him, in certain cases, £800 or £1000 ; 

 while a scientific work, the labour of years, and the result of 

 extraordinary intellectual cultivation, falls, as the phrase is, 

 " dead-bom from the press," and is ruinous both to author 

 and publisher. 



" The fault of this, I am inclined to believe, lies greatly 

 at the door of book societies and libraries. The reading 

 system is, in our own day, so perfect, and societies of this 

 kind are so numerous, that if each of them were to take a 

 copy of any individual work, it would more than exhaust 

 a large edition ; and if, on the contrary, none of them were 

 to do so, the work might be unsaleable, as there are many 

 such, that never reach the general public at all. The re- 

 medy, then, rests in a great measure with themselves ; but 

 so far from using their power, the instances that hare come 

 under my own observation seem to show that they would 

 inundate us with novels merely." 



" It has been said, with some show of truth, that those 

 Novels which are written with particular aims — with moral 

 aims, for example, and not for the mere beauty of the story 

 — are all to some extent failures ; in the same way that 

 a clock which shows the day of the month, indicates the 

 changes of the moon, and has the hours announced by a 

 cuckoo, never keeps time so well as an ordinary one. This 

 may be true when the object is made more prominent than 

 the means of effecting it — an error into which moralists are 

 liable to fall in showing the correctness of their own mo- 



