the heavens and earth to its arts and sciences. The novel, therefore,
as the wildest organ of romance, is most appropriate to a time of great
intellectual agitation, when intellectual men are but half-conscious of
the tendencies that are setting about them, and consequently cease to
propose to themselves final goals, do not attempt scrupulous art, but
play jubilantly with current facts. Hence, perhaps, its popularity since
the first conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, and especially since
the great French Revolution, when amid new inventions and new ideas
mankind has contemplatively looked for the coming events, the new
historical eras, which were casting their shadows before.

When, some time, Christian art shall become classical, and Christian
ideas be developed by superior men as fairly as the Hellenic conceptions
were, the novel may either assume to itself some peculiar excellency, or
may cease to hold the comparative rank in literature which it enjoys at
present. Then the numberless prose romances which occupy the present
generation of readers will, perhaps, be collected in some immense
_corpus_, like the Byzantine historians, will be reckoned among the
curiosities of literature, and will at least have the merit of making
the study of antiquities easy and interesting. There is an old
couplet,--

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

At a time when extemporaneous composition and thoughtless reading are
much in fashion, it will not be amiss to invoke profounder studies, and
slower, but more useful and permanent results. Let it be remembered that
even the Divine Mind first called into being the chaos of creation, and
then in seven days reviewed and elaborated it into a beautiful order.