VI. _The Lamp of Humanity_.--One day we see the walls placarded with the advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a man seizing her behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the ordure, he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely horrible, that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as licentiousness itself--the passions which were stimulated by the gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bull- fights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperilling human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing character, awakening emotions which when awakened dignify and save from harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore.