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This is a delusion founded upon the failure to perceive the radical difference between the technique of the novelist and the dramatist. It is true that in some cases adaptations have had enormous success: one might take two modern instances, The Little Minister and Sherlock Holmes. The latter really confirms these remarks.

To be sure, Dickens had been over and made, people thought, a somewhat caustic return for the hospitable welcome; Harriet Martineau had made a tour, and gone home rather favourably impressed; and the winter before the intellectual circle and it was getting to be quite notable had honoured the Swedish novelist, Frederica Bremer, and been really charmed by her unaffected sweetness.

No other French novelist has been able to "express in words the lights and shades, harmonies and contrasts, the magic of sounds, the symphonies of color, the depth and distances of the woods, the infinite movement of the sea and the skythe interior soul of Nature, that vibrates in everything and everybody."

Gradually an uneasiness came over the novelist, his sensitive nerves responding to the disquiet in the smiling eyes opposite. "You're kind of crazy," he leaned forward and whispered as if confiding an ominous, impersonal secret. "You've got the eyes of a man kind of crazy, Erik."

From this moment we may read of the pleasures and thoughts, the experiences and meditations, but scarcely ever of the sufferings of the dying novelist, in the pages of what has been well called "one of the most unfeigned and touching little tracts in our own or any other literature" Confined for six weeks in the narrow prison of an eighteenth century trading vessel; unable to move save when lifted by unskilled hands; with food often intolerable to the healthiest appetite; with no relaxation save the company of the rough old sea-dog who commanded the Queen of Portugal; and fully conscious that his was a mortal illness, the inexhaustible courage, the delight in man and in nature, the genius of Henry Fielding still triumphed over every external circumstance.

He seized both hands of the man into whose apartments he had obtruded himself. He pressed them. He gazed at him with feverish eyes, with eyes which had not closed for hours, and he murmured, drawing the novelist into the tiny salon: "You have come, Julien, you are here! Ah, I thank you for having answered my call at once!

The man swore by all the strange and wonderful gods he knew and they were many that he feared to spend an hour with that effervescing young female devotee of the Arts lest the mountains in their wrath should fall upon him. But that day, when Mrs. Taine came for the last sitting, the novelist engaged in interesting talk with the artist forgot.

Sometimes, as in the case of the celebrated Lilly Dale, the public tolerates a bold exception to the ordinary rule, on account of the extreme piquancy of the thing; but no wise novelist ventures habitually to disregard the prevalent opinion that the heroine's mission is to become a wife before the end of the third volume.

If this were the case, I would willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any relic of the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls, but simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour.

Scott is thus a romanticist because he gave the romantic implications of reality: and is a novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which admits it to be the novelist's business to portray social humanity, past or present, by means of a unified, progressive prose narrative.