_Pisistratus._--"Perfectly clear, sir, but I don't see what it has to do with My Novel." _Mr. Caxton._--"Every thing. Your novel, if it is to be a full and comprehensive survey of the '_Quicquid agunt homines_', (which it ought to be, considering the length and breadth to which I foresee, from the slow development of your story, you meditate extending and expanding it,) will embrace the two views of existence, the integral and the fractional. You have shown us the former in Leonard, when he is sitting in his mother's cottage, or resting from his work by the little fount in Riccabocca's garden. And in harmony with that view of his life, you have surrounded him with comparative integrals, only subdivided by the tender hands of their immediate families and neighbors--your Squires and Parsons, your Italian exile and his Jemima. With all these, life is more or less the life natural, and this is always more or less the life integral. Then comes the life artificial, which is always more or less the life fractional. In the life natural, wherein we are swayed but by our own native impulses and desires, subservient only to the great silent law of virtue, (which has pervaded the universe since it swung out of chaos,) a man is of worth from what he is in himself--Newton was as worthy before the apple fell from the tree as when all Europe applauded the discoverer of the principle of gravity. But in the life artificial we are only of worth in as much as we affect others. And, relative to that life, Newton rose in value more than a million per cent. when down fell the apple from which ultimately sprang up his discovery. In order to keep civilization going, and spread over the world the light of human intellect, we have certain desires within us, ever swelling beyond the ease and independence which belong to us as integrals. Cold man as Newton might be, (he once took a lady's hand in his own, Kitty, and used her forefinger for his tobacco-stopper; great philosopher!)--cold as he might be, he was yet moved into giving his discoveries to the world, and that from motives very little differing in their quality from the motives that make Dr. Squills communicate articles to the Phrenological Journal upon the skulls of Bushmen and wombats. For it is the _property of light to travel_. When a man has light in him, forth it must go. But the first passage of genius from its integral state (in which it has been reposing on its own wealth) into the fractional, is usually through a hard and vulgar pathway. It leaves behind it the reveries of solitude--that self-contemplating rest which may be called the Visionary, and enters suddenly into the state that may be called the Positive and Actual. There, it sees the operation of money on the outer life--sees all the ruder and commoner springs of action--sees ambition without nobleness--love without romance--is bustled about, and ordered, and trampled, and cowed--in short, it