Then, with ease of locomotion came the habit of flux--which is infinitely more developed to-day in the United States than in Great Britain. In London and the urban districts that house by far the greater bulk of the English population the prevalence of the seven years’ lease has hitherto tended to anchor families in one spot for at least that length of time, but even that space is not sufficient to give a family much insight into the lives and habits of its neighbours. In any case it is significant that novel-reading is almost infinitely more a permanent habit in the United States than in Great Britain, and the position of the imaginative writer in so far more satisfactory. In observing a social phenomenon like the novel these social changes must be considered. The fact is that gossip is a necessity for keeping the mind of humanity as it were aerated and where, owing to lack of sufficiently intimate circumstances in communities gossip cannot exist, its place must be supplied--and it is supplied by the novel. You may say that for the great cities of to-day its place is taken by what in the United States is called the “tabloid” and in England the “yellow” or “gutter” Press. But these skilful sensational renderings of merely individual misfortunes, necessary as they are to human existence and sanity in the great cities, are yet too highly coloured by their producers, and the instances themselves are too far from the normal to be of any great educational value. An occasional phrase in, say, a Peaches-Browning case may now and then ring true, but the sound common sense of great publics is aware that these affairs are too often merely put-up jobs to attach any importance to them as casting light on normal human motives. The servant of a country parsonage leaning over the yew-hedge giving on the turnpike and saying that the vicar’s wife was carrying on something dreadful with Doctor Lambert might convey some sort of view of life, ethics, morals, and the rest to another young woman; but the minute dissection by commonplace-minded reporters of the actions and agonies of a lady who essays first unsuccessfully to poison her husband and finally dispatches him with a club--these minute dissections are not only usually read with a grain of salt, but not unusually, too, they are speedily forgotten. Scenes on the other hand presented with even a minimum of artistry will remain in the mind as long as life lasts: _Ivanhoe_ must permanently represent mediaevalism for a great proportion of the inhabitants of the globe, though Scott was a very poor artist; and the death of Emma Bovary will remain horrific in the reader’s mind, whilst the murder of yesterday is on the morrow forgotten.