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In their way home, Mad. de Rosier stopped the carriage at a circulating library. "Are you going to ask for the novel we were talking of yesterday?" cried Matilda. "A novel!" said Isabella, contemptuously: "no, I dare say Mad. de Rosier is not a novel-reader." "Zeluco, sir, if you please," said Mad. de Rosier.
For my own part I cannot conceive dying with resignation knowing that the publishers were binding up at the time anything of Henryk Sienckiewicz's or Thomas Hardy's. So it is important that a man begin early, because he will have to quit all too soon. There are no women novel-readers. There are women who read novels, of course; but it is a far cry from reading novels to being a novel-reader.
"Thou art the cause of my downfall from Heaven!" I muttered, when I looked upon Isora's calm face: "thou feelest it not, and I could destroy thee and myself, myself the criminal, thee the cause of the crime!" * I need not point out to the novel-reader how completely the character of Aubrey has been stolen in a certain celebrated French romance.
"Eureka!" cries the professional novel-reader, that far-sighted and keen-scented hound that snuffs a denouement afar off; and anon there rises before his eyes the vision of poor little Stella drinking in love and learning, especially love, from the divine eyes of the anything but divine Swift, of Shirley, the lioness, the pantheress, the leopardess, the beautiful, fierce creature, sitting, tamed, quiet, meek, by the side of Louis Moore, her tutor and master, and of all the legends of all the ages wherein Beauty has sat at the feet of Wisdom, and Love has crept in unawares, and spoiled the lesson while as yet half-unlearnt; so he cries, "She is going the way of all heroines.
In this way the reader's sense of right is lowered and an appetite created an appetite that can not be satisfied; the more it is fed, the more depraved and exacting it becomes. Gradually the desire for the romantic increases until the novel-reader longs to have a romance of her own.
Any story-book or novel you take up is full of feeling descriptions of what everybody ate and drank, and there are a great many more meals than kisses; so that the novel-reader who expects a love-tale, finds with disgust that he is put off with menus.
This much however, may be said of history, that it is looking up in these days as a result of studying the spirit of the novel. And ever since then the world has read only these three writers upon these three epochs and many other men have been writing history upon the same model. No good novel-reader need be ashamed to read them, in fact.
Said Jephson, who has a practical mind, approaching at times the commercial: "The question is not what we like, but what the female novel-reader likes." "That is so," agreed MacShaugnassy. "I propose that we collect feminine opinion upon this point. I will write to my aunt, and get from her the old lady's view.
As soon as I heard of the wreck of the Jingo, and that you were the only passenger drowned, I recognized an artifice, un vieux truc, by which you hoped to escape from a mother of whom you were ashamed. You had only pretended to be the victim of Ocean's rage! People who are drowned in novels always do reappear: and, Percy, your mother is an old novel-reader!
When at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the most celebrated works of Voltaire and Molière; and, what seems still more extraordinary, had never heard or seen a line of Churchill, who, when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets. It is particularly deserving of observation, that she appears to have been by no means a novel-reader.
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