history as a task, but tales of fiction as a delight.

The greatest merit of fiction is the one so ably put forward by Sir
James Mackintosh, namely, that it creates and nourishes sympathy.
It extends this sympathy, too, in directions where, otherwise, we
hardly see when it would have come. But it may be objected that
this sympathy is indiscriminate, and that we are in danger of mixing
up virtue and vice, and blurring both, if we are led to sympathise
with all manner of wrong-doers. But, in the first place, virtue and
vice are so mixed in real life, that it is well to be somewhat
prepared for that fact; and, moreover, the sympathy is not wrongly
directed. Who has not felt intense sympathy for Macbeth? Yet could
he be alive again, with evil thoughts against "the gracious Duncan,"
and could he see into all that has been felt for him, would that be
an encouragement to murder? The intense pity of wise people for the
crimes of others, when rightly represented, is one of the strongest
antidotes against crime. We have taken the extreme case of sympathy
being directed towards bad men. How often has fiction made us
sympathise with obscure suffering and retiring greatness, with the
world-despised, and especially with those mixed characters in whom
we might otherwise see but one colour--with Shylock and with Hamlet,
with Jeanie Deans and with Claverhouse, with Sancho Panza as well as
with Don Quixote.


On the other hand, there is a danger of too much converse with
fiction leading us into dream-land, or rather into lubber-land. Of
course this "too much converse" implies large converse with inferior
writers. Such writers are too apt to make life as they would have
it for themselves. Sometimes, also, they must make it to suit