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 booksellers’ rules. Having such power over their puppets they abuse it. They can kill these puppets, change their natures suddenly, reward or punish them so easily, that it is no wonder they are led to play fantastic tricks with them. Now, if a sedulous reader of the works of such writers should form his notions of real life from them, he would occasionally meet with rude shocks when he encountered the realities of that life. * * * * *