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She was an inveterate novel-reader, and claimed kindred with a star of chief magnitude in the profession, and to speak lightly of light literature in her presence always brought her out warmly and vigorously in defence and praise of it. "No good in such works, Mr. Jones!" cried she.
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.
He is too good an economist for that. We learn this from all the analogies. As a soul can not perish, so it never remains unemployed. It still works, though its labors may be confined to a treadmill. The mere novel-reader may regard all this as so much unnecessary digression. But let him not deceive himself.
When I state that I was own brother to Lord Burleydon, had an income of two thousand a year, could speak all the polite languages fluently, was a powerful swordsman, a good shot, and could ride anything from an elephant to a clotheshorse, I really think I have said enough to satisfy any feminine novel-reader of Bayswater or South Kensington that I was a hero.
No other method can wind itself so completely into the psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples of it since Richardson's day. Why is this?
The novel-reader therefore, by becoming indisposed towards these, excludes himself from moral improvement, and deprives himself of the most substantial pleasure, which reading can produce. In vain do books on the study of nature unfold to him the treasures of the mineral or the vegetable world. He foregoes this addition to his knowledge, and this innocent food for his mind.
There is, of course, but one sort of novel-reader who is of any importance He is the man who began under the age of fourteen and is still sticking to it at whatever age he may be and full of a terrifying anxiety lest he may be called away in the midst of preliminary announcements of some pet author's "next forthcoming."
Not exactly, dear novel-reader. This was it. That same night, by a bright fire lighting up snowy walls, burnished copper, gleaming candlesticks, and a dinner-table floor, sat the mistress of the house, Christie Johnstone, and her brother, Flucker. She with a book, he with his reflections opposite her. "Lassie, hae ye ony siller past ye?" "Ay, lad; an' I mean to keep it!"
"He was a cantankerous old brute," said the Duke of Stone with candor, "but he chanced to be an omnivorous novel-reader. Nothing was too sentimental for him in his later years." "I took the thing out and read it," Tembarom went on, uneasily, the emotion of his first novel-reading stirring him as he talked. "It kept me up half the night, and I hadn't finished it then. I wanted to know the end."
"I am no novel-reader I seldom look into novels Do not imagine that I often read novels It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.
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