Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/82

 If these facts be true, what is the part of wisdom? To endeavour to crush this taste? No;—has not every disposition been implanted by our Creator for some wise and good purpose?

Let wisdom and virtue rather continue to mould this propensity into a cause of beneficial influence. In doing this, other agencies must necessarily be brought to subserve the grand end of practical utility. Hereby may be demonstrated the power and consequent importance of Fiction, when employed as a moral agent in upholding virtue and denouncing vice, in exposing the follies and condemning the wickedness of mankind. Let us go back to our own early impressions: who cannot retrace a long-growing dislike and fear of some particular fault, or a still-strengthening approval of an opposite virtue to the vivid effect produced by a well-written tale? Both virtue and fault perhaps had been set before us a hundred times, but it was not till we saw the one exemplified in the conduct of a good girl, or the consequences of the other pictured in the misery of a naughty boy, that either wrought upon us any degree of that influential impression which has since grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength. If we could carry out the suggestion of Foster, in one of his admirable essays—"Were it possible for a man to live back again to his infancy, through all the scenes of his life, and to give back from his mind and character at each time and circumstance as he repassed it, exactly that which he took from it when he was there before, it would be curious to see the fragments and exuviae of the moral man lying here and there along the retrograde path, and to find what he was in the beginning of this train of modifications and acquisitions,"—if this process