Personally, on the face of it, I ought to be glad if, in the interests of non-commercial literature, the novel of commerce could be suppressed, but as a matter of fact I should be the first to lament such a catastrophe. Humanity, in fact, needs care-free entertainment--and in search of it it seldom goes very far wrong. That is proved by the fact that, ever since books were books, the great public has devoured with avidity only two kinds of work--the very worst from the point of view of the literary artists, and the very best! The four most popular books the world over at any given moment since, say, eighteen-sixty have always been the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Madame Bovary_ and two sempiternally changing works of egregious silliness and popularity. But whereas the so-called popular books change with the turn of each year, the more serious works continue to stand at the head of the best-sellers of the world year in and year out. That is a consideration to which we may return; the point that I wish to make here is that when _contes_ and _nouvelles_ of the type to be found in the _Decameron_ were of an almost boundless popularity, not only had the serious novel no existence but the reprehension that the Victorian moralist and industrialist expressed also found then no expression. As I am never tired of relating, my grand-aunt Eliza was the first utterer of the famous saying: “Sooner than be idle I’d take a book and read”; but that utterance, perfectly normal and applauded about 1860 when it was first presented to the world, is to-day purely risible and could not in serious earnestness be uttered in the household of any family more comfortable in its circumstances than those of the lower-paid manual labourer. It would have been equally unthinkable at any date from the tenth century to the early nineteenth. During those nine centuries, in fact, the professional moralist was only too glad to enlist the services of the fiction-teller under the sacred banners of Faith and Good Works, and although towards the end of the eighteenth century the habits of young ladies who lay day-long on sofas reading the thousandfold novels of popular female authors from Aphra Behn to Sarah Fielding--although that habit was lightly satirized by dramatists and occasionally scourged in the sermons of nonconformist divines, these occurrences were very sporadic and altogether too infrequent to form a national habit. Indeed, until the nineteenth century was under way it might even be advanced that the writers of such works of fiction as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Rasselas_, or _Robinson Crusoe_ were eagerly sought as allies by the professional, ecclesiastical, or nonconformist moralist.