that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes. The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel. Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write what they call novels?— “Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,” says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies in most force to that class of _poemata_, which pretends to narrate the epic of life in the form of prose. For the _docti_ as well as the _indocti_—men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy. Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers, which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so purely in the imagination, _that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth_. As HEGEL well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular.