idle like himself; they led him into extravagance; extravagance led him to gambling, as a last resort for the repairing of his fortune; but it had a contrary effect, and completed his ruin his disappointments made him quarrelsome, and a quarrel brought on a duel, in - which he lost his life at five and twenty. In this short account of Eugenio you have the history of many young men of this age, who are bewitched with the ideas of liberty and pleasure; but with this difference, that some are destroyed by others, and some destroy themselves.

The progress is much the same with a nation as with an individual; when they rise from poverty, activity, and industry, to improvement, ease, and elegance, they sink into indolence and luxury, which bring on a fever and delirium, till having quarrelled among themselves, and turned their swords against one another, they fall by a sort of political suicide, or become a prey to some foreign enemy.

WHEN you read for amusement, let your mind be turned as much as possible to the real transactions of human life, as they are represented and commented upon by wise and faithful historians; and beware of throwing away your time, as too many now do, by giving yourself up to trifling works of imagination, of which there is a deluge in the present age, to the subversion of common sense, and the general corruption of our principles

and morals.

While I was in the shop of a sensible bookseller in the country, a young man presented himself, who came for some volumes of a novel. As soon as he turned his back, "Sir (said the bookseller), our trade is now in a manner reduced to this one article of letting out novels that young man has read half the novels in my collection; and when he has finished his studies, by reading the other half, the ignorance he brought into my shop would have done him more good than the knowledge

he

he will carry out of it." Many other occurrences have led me to reflect on this fashion, which has increased so much of late years, as nearly to swallow up all other reading; like the lean kine of Pharaoh, which swallowed up all the fat ones, and did not look the better for it.

Consider therefore, before your judgment is corrupted, that most novels are exceedingly lean in their matter, to say the best of them. Many of them are the cold productions of people who write for the fashion (with as much indifference as milliners make caps), without any materials worth communicating. Others are the offspring of a rambling fancy, which puts together a string of incidents, not one degree above the tea-table, and of no more real concern than if they were to hold you by the ears as some tiresome people do, with an account of their dreams; indeed many of them are but the waking dreams of those who know neither the world nor themselves. Many of them also are mean imitations, which affect the style and manner of more successful compositions. Some of them are void of all regular design, and made up of heterogeneous parts, which have no dependence upon one another.

late

-latè qui splendeat unus et alter

Assuitur pannus

And thus they become like the party-coloured jacket of a fool upon the stage of a mountebank, who sets the rabble a-gape with the low and insipid wonders he has collected, to detain them in his company, and draw the money out of their pockets.

It were well if the reading of novels were nothing worse than the loss of time and money, though this is bad enough; but young people will not escape so; it has generally a bad effect upon the mind, and, in some instances, a fatal effect upon the morals and fortune. In novels, plays, and romances (for they have all the same general object, which is amusement) good and evil are disguised by false colourings and unjust representations. The end is, to please: and how is this end to be obtained? Nothing will please loose people but intrigues and loose adventures; nothing will please the unlettered profligate but blasphemous sneers upon religion and the holy Scriptures; nothing will please the vicious but the palliation of vice and the contempt of virtue: therefore novelists and comic writers who study popularity, either for praise or profit, mix up vice with amiable qualities,

8

to

to cover and recommend it, while virtue is compounded with such ingredients as have a natural tendency to make it odious. These tricks are put upon the public every day, and they take those for their benefactors who thus impose upon them.

But novels vitiate the taste while they cor rupt the manners: through a desire of captivating the imagination, they fly above nature and reality; their characters are all overcharged, and their incidents boil over with improbabilities and absurdities. The imagination, thus fed with wind and flatulence, loses its relish for truth, and can bear nothing that is ordinary: so that the reading of novels is to the mind what dram-drinking is to the body; the palate is vitiated, the stomach is squeamish, the juices are corrupted, the digestion is spoiled, and life can be kept up only by that which is supernatural and violent. The gamester who accustoms himself to violent agitations, can find no pleasure unless his passions are all kept upon the stretch, like the rigging of a ship in a storm; his amusement is in racks, tortures, and even madness itself: and such is the taste of those who habituate their imaginations to the flights and extravagancies of modern romances.