"Arabian Nights?" I was once present when a young gentleman at table put
a tart away from him, and said to his neighbor, the Younger Son (with
rather a fatuous air), "I never eat sweets."

"Not eat sweets! and do you know why?" says T.

"Because I am past that kind of thing," says the young gentleman.

"Because you are a glutton and a sot!" cries the Elder (and Juvenis
winces a little). "All people who have natural, healthy appetites, love
sweets; all children, all women, all Eastern people, whose tastes
are not corrupted by gluttony and strong drink." And a plateful of
raspberries and cream disappeared before the philosopher.

You take the allegory? Novels are sweets. All people with healthy
literary appetites love them--almost all women;--a vast number of
clever, hard-headed men. Why, one of the most learned physicians in
England said to me only yesterday, "I have just read So-and-So for
the second time" (naming one of Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges,
bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as
well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers. Who
has not read about Eldon, and how he cried over novels every night when
he was not at whist?

As for that lazy naughty boy at Chur, I doubt whether HE will like
novels when he is thirty years of age. He is taking too great a glut of
them now. He is eating jelly until he will be sick. He will know most
plots by the time he is twenty, so that HE will never be surprised when
the Stranger turns out to be the rightful earl,--when the old waterman,
throwing off his beggarly gabardine, shows his stars and the collars of