With regard to the first of these propositions, I should say that crimes of all kinds occur more frequently in all imaginative literature than they do in the dull routine of everyday existence. Murder, for example, is much more frequent in _Shakespeare_ than it is in ordinary English life. Even stories that are considered innocent enough to be read by the young, such as _The Arabian Nights_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and, in recent times, Mr. Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_, are full of villainy and homicide, introduced for no purpose in the world but to excite the interest of the reader. What would English critics say to a Frenchman who should affirm that there are suicide clubs in England like the mutual murder society described with such circumstantial detail in the _New Arabian Nights_? If we think of a few famous English novels we shall find that they often describe situations which are certainly not common in the ordinary lives of respectable people like ourselves. We are not generally either bigamists, or seducers, or wife-slayers, yet _Jane Eyre_ turned upon an intended bigamy, _Adam Bede_ turned upon a case of seduction and infanticide, and _Paul Ferroll_ fascinated us by the wonderfully self-possessed behaviour of a gentleman who had quietly murdered his wife, as she lay in bed, early one summer morning. In _Daniel Deronda_ the most polished gentleman in the book has a family of illegitimate children, and the most brilliant young lady becomes, in intention, a murderess, whilst the sweetest girl is rescued from attempted suicide. These things _may_ happen, which is enough for the purposes of the novelist. In France the great difficulty of that artist is the uninteresting nature of the usual preliminaries of marriage, so that he is thrown back upon adulterous love as the only kind that is adventurous and romantic. [Sidenote: That Fiction only represents Collected Cases.] [Sidenote: Situations often Invented.] [Sidenote: Materials not necessarily Abundant.] The argument that the world of reality must be like the world of fiction fails in another way. Real people are almost infinitely more numerous than the creations of novelists, therefore, if every immoral adventure in novels were drawn from life, it would only prove that the novelist had collected cases, as a medical student might collect cases of disease in a fairly healthy population. As a matter of fact, however, the novelist does not usually take his _incidents_ from reality; he will often go to nature for his characters, and to invention for his situations. The material in real life that suggests the stories need not be very abundant. The cases of immorality found in the English newspapers alone would be more than enough to keep the principal French novelists at work all the year round. [Sidenote: Novelists a small Class.] [Sidenote: Tempted by Money.] [Sidenote: The Reader must be Excited.] [Sidenote: Novelists acute Tradesmen.]