Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve a certain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could secure that end by successively treating The Great Forms of Modern Literature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage of entertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have thought that inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, we might now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, and in still further contrast; that we might study that form not so much _analytically_--as when we developed the _Science_ of Formal Poetry from a single physical principle--but this time synthetically, from the point of view of literary _art_ rather than of literary science. I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so far as I know--but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may be in error--there is no book extant in any language which gives a conspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary forms which have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of the curious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under the stress of that imperious demand for expression which all men's emotions make, have respectively determined the modes of such expression to be in one case _The Novel_, in another _The Sermon_, in another _The Newspaper Leader_, in another _The Scientific Essay_, in another _The Popular Magazine Article_, in another _The Semi-Scientific Lecture_, and so on: each of these prose-forms, you observe, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite as well-defined as the Sonnet-Form, the Ballad-Form, the Drama-Form, and the like in verse. And, with this general plan, a great number of considerations which I hope will satisfactorily emerge as we go on, lead me irresistibly to select the Novel as the particular prose-form for our study. It happens, indeed, that over and above the purely literary interest which would easily give this form the first place in such a series as the present, the question of the Novel has just at this time become one of the most pressing and vital of all the practical problems which beset our moral and social economy.