hunger, or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so passionate
and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with
less emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the
wasted corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the
tremulous kiss and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We
believe that they admired these things less than ourselves, but
that they felt them more. We should perhaps say that they felt
them too much to admire them. The progress of a nation from
barbarism to civilisation produces a change similar to that which
takes place during the progress of an individual from infancy to
mature age. What man does not remember with regret the first
time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable
to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither
knew nor cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably
thought it not half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about
dark-browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values
Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence a
story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be
popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest
opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand
touches which formerly he passed by without notice. But, though
he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly,
he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty
Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe
which could not be brought down to the water edge, the tent with
its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where
the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which
they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon