Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/211



GREAT deal of generous scorn has been expended of late years upon those old-fashioned novels in which the characters were given plenty to do, and did it with a supreme energy and passion, only possible, perhaps, within the enchanted precincts of fiction. Such stories, we are told, are false to life, which is monotonous, uneventful, and made up day by day of minute and tedious detail, small pleasures which are hardly recognizable as such, and grim vexations which can never be persuaded to assume noble or heroic proportions. The truthful representation of life being the only worthy object of a novelist's skill, it follows that his tale should be destitute of any incidents save those with which we are all familiar in the narrow routine of existence. We should be able to verify them by

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