The excitement afforded by novels is of several different kinds. There is the excitement of love and passion--perhaps the most deeply grained sentiment of the human heart, and apparently the most necessary to health of the heart, especially in these days when our spontaneous emotions are constantly being repressed. Then there is the excitement of travel and adventure. Finally we have the novel of intellectual piquancy, the book full of epigrams and smart sayings such as Oscar Wilde might have written. The novel of love and passion may be the lascivious and dirty book, or sin equally by being the weakly sentimental Sunday school story. The abuse of the novel of travel and adventure is the cheap dime novel, or the high-priced dime novel called the historical romance. And the extreme of the epigrammatic story is the snobby smart novel, which tends to make prigs of us. This last novel is largely a modern development. In any of these lines a novel is good if it gives us real men and women, acting naturally and truly, and is written with sufficient rapidity and lightness. The great sin in a novel is ignorance of human nature; and the next sin is dullness. Either is fatal. The oldest examples of modern fiction are two great collections of tavern tales--Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabian Nights. These stories were told to amuse; because they amused those who listened to them, they have well succeeded in amusing English readers for several hundred years since. The Decameron is largely a series of stories of love and passion. They are many of them exceedingly amusing even to the modern reader; but according to modern standards so many of them are actually indecent that a translation of this book is hardly to be obtained in a respectable bookstore, and should never be allowed in the hands of a person under twenty-five. For the young the great book of exciting adventure is the Arabian Nights. All the indecent stories have been omitted in the modern translations, and the excitement stops short of the point at which it can do any serious harm in over-stimulation. The best story to begin with is that of Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp--a story every one ought to be familiar with; and next to that the series of tales of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. After reading these, turn to Poe’s clever “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade,” which closely follows the adventures of Sinbad, but bases every wonder on a scientific fact stated in a note. This modern tale of wonder is much more marvellous than the imaginary wonder stories of the ancients, though its wonders are in reality strict truths. Mr. H. G. Wells, the modern novelist, has followed out the same line successfully in his pseudo-scientific stories. By comparative study of this kind one will find fresh interest in an old book.