characteristics, and its own special ways of being studied. What these are we will now proceed to describe. And in treating of the various great departments of literature, we will not attempt to arrange them according to a natural order. We will rather take them in the order of their popularity.

MAN

CHAPTER II.

WORKS OF FICTION.

AN comes into the world the most helpless of creatures. He is little else than a soft, sprawling, squalling piece of flesh. How is it possible that he will manage to survive in this bustling, jostling world, where his fellow-creatures will thrust him aside, and the mysterious powers of nature lie in wait on every side, ready to crush. him? How will he know how to act amid so many difficult and perplexing circumstances? God has provided for this. A craving has been given to him which will never let him rest, but which compels him to seek the very things necessary for his guidance through life. This craving is an irrepressible desire to know what others are doing, to add to his own experience the experience of others. And he does not wish to know them in the

He wishes, in other

This desire, too, con

abstract, but in the concrete; not so much what they are, but what they are doing. And if he cannot see them undergoing adventures in reality, he wishes to see them in imagination. words, to hear a narrative. tinues all his life. 'Tell me a story,' lisps the infant almost as soon as he is able to speak. Commend me to an exciting novel,' says the young man. 'Anything new? What is going on?' asks the man of middle age.

Now, if things were as they ought to be, history and biography should suffice to satisfy this craving. But history treats of great political events, and biography of great geniuses, and the majority of people care little for either of these. Like draws to like. They prefer ordinary occurrences and ordinary people; and if they cannot get them real, they must have them imaginary. The historian, there

fore, is thrust aside and the novelist called in.

In doing this, people cannot be said to be casting away the true and preferring the false. The circumstances of a novel, which after all are not essential, may be imaginary; but the description of the rise and progress of the action, which is the substance of