liberties; and the story of the apple, in exciting the domestic interest of the relationship between father and son, is that very portion of history which the dramatic artist will the most religiously conserve,—obtaining therein one incalculable advantage for his effect—viz., that it is not his own invention, and therefore of disputable probability; but, whether fable or truth in the eyes of the historical critic, so popularly received and acknowledged as a truth, that the audience are prepared to enter into the emotions of the father, and the peril of the son. It is, then, not in the invention of a story, nor in the creation of imaginary characters, that a dramatist proves his originality as an artist, but in the adaptation of a story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic purpose; and in the fidelity, not to historical detail, but to psychological and metaphysical truth with which he reconciles the motives and conduct of the characters he selects from history, to the situations in which they are placed, so as to elicit for them, under all that is peculiar to their nature or their fates, the necessary degree of sympathy from emotions of which the generality of mankind are susceptible. But to the narrator of fiction—to the story-teller—the invention of fable and of imaginary character is obviously among the legitimate conditions of his art; and a fable purely original has in him a merit which it does not possess in the tragic or comic poet. On the other hand, the skilful mechanism of plot, though not without considerable value in the art of narrative, is much less requisite in the Novelist than in the Dramatist. Many of the greatest prose fictions are independent of plot altogether. It is only by straining the word to a meaning foreign to the sense it generally conveys, that we can recognise a plot in ‘Don Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture of the word can make a plot out of ‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason that the novel admits of what the drama never should admit—viz., the operation of _accident_ in the conduct of the story: the villain, instead of coming to a tragic close through the inevitable sequences of the fate he has provoked, may be carried off, at the convenient time, by a stroke of apoplexy, or be run over by a railway train. Nevertheless, in artistic narrative, accident, where it affects a _dénouement_, should be very sparingly employed. Readers, as well as critics, feel it to be a blot in the story of ‘Rob Roy’ when the elder brothers of Rashleigh Osbaldistone are killed off by natural causes unforeseen and unprepared for in the previous train of events narrated, in order to throw Rashleigh into a position which the author found convenient for his ultimate purpose.