Every novel which is a true picture of any part, however humble, of humanity, should be suggestive and inspiring. "Tell me a story," says the child, and listens rapt in attention, unconscious that while the story-teller carries on the tale, his own mind is being widened by new thoughts and charged with new ideas. We are all children when we sit with the open novel and go off into the Land of the Other Folk. We come back, when we close the book, with a wider experience of humanity, with new friends, new loves, and new enemies. I think that the strongest defence of fiction should be the fact that the true presentation of humanity from any point of view must tend to the increase of certain virtues-sympathy, pity, and an ardour inextinguishable, when once it has seized the soul, for justice. This is a great claim for fiction: yet I advance it in favour not only of the great works which move a whole nation, but of the humble stories whose only merit is their plain unvarnished truth. What made The Vicar of Wakefield popular? What preserves it? It is not a great work; it deals not with ambitions and great passions; it treats simply of a single family, undistinguished, one of the crowd, yet so truthfully and naturally that we cannot suffer it to be forgotten.

In these days the most important teacher-the most widespread, the most eagerly heard-whether for good or evil, is the novelist. Between Russia in the East, and California in the West, it is the novelist who teaches. He is the fount of inspiration; he gives the world ideas; he makes them intelligible; sometimes, in rare cases, he so touches the very depths of a people that his words reverberate and echo as from rock to rock and from valley to valley far beyond the ear of him who listens. In these cases he makes history, because he causes history to be made.

Let me illustrate my meaning by one or two cases. I might, for instance, adduce Rabelais, who put into living figures and action the revolt of the populace against the Church. He did not speak for the scholars-Étienne Dolet did that-yet he loaded his page with allusions not intelligible except to scholars: he spoke the language of the people and presented them, as at a puppet show,

with figures which embodied their beliefs and their hatreds. It was Rabelais who made the attempt at a French Reformation possible; it was Calvin who turned away the heart of the people by his austerities and his narrowness and made it impossible. This illustration is not, I fear, intelligible to many readers, because Rabelais is only read by scholars. Take, however, the work of Voltaire and especially his tales. There was plenty of a coarse kind of atheism, before these tales were passed from hand to hand, among the aristocracy of France. There was plenty of epigram against the régime; Voltaire gave to all, noble and bourgeois alike, new weapons of ridicule, scorn, and contempt; he offered all upon the altar of doubt; he it was who stripped the French Revolution of religion, of any belief in anything except the one great virtue of the French people-their patriotism. And he spoke at the critical moment; at the moment when all minds were prepared for him, as the fields in spring are prepared for the showers of April.

In Charles Reade, the language possesses a writer whose whole soul was filled with a yearning for justice and a pity for the helpless. I think that the world has not yet done justice to the great heart of Charles Reade. He wrote many books. Among them there were two which are still widely read and deservedly popular. One of them is written with a purpose: I do not know if the result satisfied him at the time; one thing is certain that the position of the man who has fallen into crime has at least gained enormously by this book. There is sympathy for the poor man; light is thrown upon the prison where he sits; he is followed when he comes out. One can never wipe away the prison taint, but one can treat him as one who has expiated his crime and may be received again, albeit in a lower place.

Again, can one ever forget the effect of Harriet Beecher Stowe's great work? I am old enough to remember when that book ran through the length and breadth of this country in editions numberless-I believe they were mostly pirated. The long and wearisome agitation against slavery had died out with the emancipation of the West Indian slaves. The younger people remembered nothing about it; then suddenly appeared this book, and we were

reminded once more what slavery might be, if not what slavery was. No book was ever more widely read; no book ever produced such response of sympathy with the Abolitionists. When the Civil War broke out it seemed to many-it still seems to many— in America that the sympathies of all the English people were with the South. Not all and remember, if you please, that the sympathies of England were never with the "Institution."

Perhaps I may be permitted one illustration of the power of a novel in the case of a living writer. I mean the case of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsmere. This book has been, I believe, read as widely in America as in England.

It is too early to judge of the lasting effect of the book on the religious thought of either country. It is, however, certain that it was read and pondered by many thousands on account of its faithful presentation of the religious difficulties and anxieties which perplex the minds of men and women in these days. Of course, I express no opinion as to these difficulties. The explanation of that book's success, to my mind, is chiefly in the fact that it appeared, like Candide or Pantagruel, at a moment especially fitted to receive its ideas and its teaching.

It is not every novel, I repeat, that has the chance of such a success, that can hope for the honour of expressing the thought of the day, or of advancing any cause of the future; but every novel that is true, every scene that is really natural, every character who is a true man or a true woman, should secure for that work the greatest prize that can be offered to a poet or a novelist-first, the advance of human sympathy, and next, the conversion of dreams into realities.

Wather Breand

LIFE AND DEATH OF ST. GEORGE.

(From "The Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom," published in 1596.)

AFTER the angry Greeks had ruined the chief city of Phrygia, and turned King Priam's glorious buildings to a vast and desolate wilderness, Duke Æneas, exempted from his native habitation with many of his distressed countrymen (like pilgrims), wandered the world to find some happy region where they might erect the image of their subverted Troy. But, before that labor could be accomplished, Æneas ended his days in the confines of Italy, and left his son Askanius to govern in his stead. Askanius, dying, left Silvius to rule; Silvius, deceasing, left the noble and adventurous Brutus, which Bruce, being the fourth descent from Æneas, first made conquest of this land of Britain, then inhabited with monsters, giants, and a kind of wild people without government; but, by policy, he overcame them, and established good laws; when he found the first foundations of a new Troy, and named it Troynovant, but since by process of time called London. Thus began the isle of Britain to flourish, not only with sumptuous buildings, but also with valiant and courageous knights, whose adventures and bold attempts in chivalry fame shall describe what oblivion buried in obscurity. After this the land was replenished with cities, and divided into shires and countries, dukedoms, earldoms, and lordships, the patrimony of high and noble minds, wherein they lived not like cowards in their mothers' bosoms, but merited renown in martial discipline. For the famous city of Coventry was the place wherein the first Christian of England was born, and the first that ever sought for foreign adventures, whose name to this day all Europe highly hath in regard; and, for his bold and magnanimous deeds at arms, gave him this title,

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