stimulate the imagination; but the imagination may be too much stimulated and too much developed, "developed" till it at length stunts all the other faculties, and "stimulated" till it is not exhilarated merely, but tipsy. The severer faculties demand a proportionate culture, and a more sedulous one; for to cultivate the imagination, in whatever degree it is susceptible of it at all is the easiest thing in nature; the difficulty is to train it justly. Some hardy flowers will bloom in any soil, and with little or no culture and so will those of fancy.

The greater part of your time should be given to solid studies or practical duties; this should be your rule. As relaxation, to be of any value, should be moderate, so novels must not claim much of your time. They should be the condiments and spices, the confectionery of your ordinary diet; not the substantial joints, not the pièce de resistance. You might as well attempt to live on creams and syllabubs.

But you will say, perhaps. "Is it possible to read a novel by chapters? Is it in human nature to leave off in the very middle of that critical adventure in which the hero saves the life of the heroine, or close the book just in the middle of his declaration, and without listening to the delicious lovers' nonsense which passes on that occasion, or finding out how it all ends?" To me, my dear, it would be very easy; or rather I should find a difficulty perhaps, in general, in not skipping-pray don't look so cross - all that same delicious nonsense. But I admit that it is difficult for many young ladies to do so; or for any novel reader, when the fiction has real merit ;-to most young novel readers the task would be impossible.

And so, that you may not say I counsel you to perform "impossibilities," my dear, take my advice. Do not tie yourself to any such restriction as a chapter at a time. "Oh! delightful!" you will say. Stay a minute.

I would have you read novels only so moderately that there shall be no occasion for restricting yourself when you do read them. Let them be read now and then as a reward of strenuous exertion, or for having mastered some difficult book; or let them

be reserved for visits and holidays. Do not, if I may use a metaphor of that vulgar kind I have already so frequently employed, do not have a novel always in cut. Keep it for an hour of well-earned leisure, or as a relief after arduous duty, and then read it without stint. This occasional full meal will then do you no harm; and, depend on it, the fare will be doubly delicious, from the keenness of the appetite, the previous fast, and the rarity of the indulgence. But you will say, "What shall I do for my daily hour or so of rightful mental relaxation, to which you admit I am entitled ?" Well, if you will take my advice, you will ordinarily choose and oh the infinite treasures, which neither you nor I can fully exhaust, literature spreads before us! something, which, while it fully answers the purpose of healthful and innocent mental amusement, will not hold attention too long enthralled, or lead you to turn to other less exciting compositions with a sigh. Take, for example, some beautiful poem; or a paper of one of our British Essayists; or an interesting book of travels; or an article of Macaulay, who, of almost all writers, combines in greatest perfection instruction and delight. The names of Milton, Gray, Cowper, Addison, Johnson, Crabbe, and a thousand more, show what a boundless field of selection lies before you.

And now do you want a practical rule as to when you have been reading novels (however good) too much or too long? Here, then, is an infallible one. When ordinary books of a sober and instructive character are read with disrelish; when, for example, a work of well-written history seems to you, as compared with the piquant and vivid details of fiction, as if you were looking on the wrong side of a piece of tapestry; when you cannot away with dull, sober reality; when you return to practical duties with reluctance, and the work-a-day world looks sombre and sad-coloured to you, rest assured that you have been lingering too long in fairyland, and indulging too much in day-dreams. And, further, remember this; that as long as you are liable to any such unlucky consciousness, you have not carried the culture of your intellectual powers or your practical habits to the right point; for the moment

that is done, such a result becomes impossible. A mind thus equipped for life and duty, can indulge in fiction only within certain moderate limits; for purposes of innocent unbending, of legitimate amusement. Beyond that point fiction cloys; and the healthy mind, so far from repining that it cannot live longer in the Fool's Paradise,—or, if you like not that harsh term,among Elysian shadows, is conscious of as strong a desire to come back to the regions of daylight and reality, as the inveterate novel reader feels to dream on in cloud-land. It sighs for a return to the substantial and the real; and can no more live in fiction than it can bear to be always dancing polkas, or playing eternally at backgammon. Persevere for a certain time,—for the next two or three years, I think you are now eighteen (you need not blush to acknowledge your age yet), in disciplining your mind, and you are safe, I will answer for it, from the too dominant sway of any, even the greatest enchanters of fiction. But my strongest reasons of all for the advice I am giving you are yet behind, and I must reserve them for another letter.

I now proceed to those "stronger reasons to which I alluded in my last. I have reserved them for the close of my sermon," because they are the most important.

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All inordinate indulgence in works of fiction, then, tends to pervert our views of life instead of enlarging them, which, if judiciously chosen, and read in moderation, they will do; and to

quench benevolence, which, under similar restrictions, they will tend to cherish.

The excessive indulgence perverts, I say, views of life. The young mind is but too prone of itself to live in a world of fancy; indeed, in one sense, it is necessary that the imagination should thus be ever creating the future for us, or we should not act at all; but then its influence must be well regulated by a due regard to the laws of the probable, or we shall lose the present and the future too the present in dreaming of an irrational future: and the future, because we have not prepared ourselves for any possible future by the proper employment of the present. If a young gentleman or young lady's mind, of any intelligence, could be laid bare, and all the fantastical illusions it had ever indulged exposed to the world, I am afraid it would fairly expire in an agony of shame at the disclosure; it would be often found, quite apart from novel reading, to have indulged largely in the veriest chimeras of hope and fancy. But then this tendency, difficult to control at the best, is apt to be fatally strengthened by undue indulgence in fictitious literature. If a too-early love-affair and a circulating library should both concur to exasperate the malady, you may look for stark "midsummer madness." I fear that anticipations of unlooked-for windfalls of fortune, — of success achieved without toil, of fame got for the longing after it, — of brides a few degrees above angels, and husbands in whom Apollo and Adonis are happily combined, are a not uncommon result of dwelling too long in congenial fiction. Nor do I at all doubt that a thousand instances of failure in professional life, of sudden and imprudent engagements, of ridiculous or ill-assorted matches, may be ascribed to the same cause. At all events, this pernicious practice prolongs and intensifies the natural tendency to daydreaming. Had it not been for this, the spell would have been broken the imaginative sleep-walker awakened-by the rude shocks and jogs of practical life. But the dream and the walk are often continued too long, and the unhappy somnambulist vanishes-over a precipice!

But still more pernicious is the effect of this bad habit on

benevolence. This may seem strange, but it is very true nevertheless. I grant that sympathy and sensibility depend in a very high degree on the activity of the imagination—on our power of vividly picturing to ourselves the joys and sorrows of others; but do not hastily conclude that excess in reading fiction, provided that fiction be a just picture of life, (which I now assume,) can, whatever harm it may do in other directions, do none in this. It may quicken sympathy and strengthen sensibility, nay, in one sense it will do so, — and yet, I stick to my paradox notwithstanding; namely, that it tends to weaken practical benevolence, and may end in quenching it altogether.

However, I must make the preliminary remark, that, even if the habit did not render benevolence less active, sensibility is of no value except as it is under the direction of judgment and reason; which presupposes, therefore, the harmonious culture of all the faculties and susceptibilities of our nature. Apart from a well balanced mind, neither prompt sympathy nor acute sensibility are of much value, and often only inspire visionary, whimsical, perhaps very sublime, but also very impracticable, projects.

But I would not have you ignorant, my dear, that the indulgence in question is liable to be attended with a much more serious evil than this. To be truly benevolent in heart, and strive to show it, even though the mode were so absurd as to prove that the heart had robbed the head of all its brains, would be something;-to be laughed at as an idiotic angel would still have some consolation. But the mischief is, that a morbid indulgence of sympathy and sensibility is but too likely to end in extinguishing benevolence. I imagine I hear you say, "Sensibility to distress, and sympathy with it, quench benevolence! this is, indeed, a hard lesson; who can hear it ?" It is true notwithstanding; and as sympathy with distress, fictitious distress, you understand, and sensibility to it, increases, active benevolence may be in precisely inverse ratio.

If you ask how this can be, I answer that it depends on a curious law of our mental mechanism, which was pointed out by Bishop Butler, -with whose writings, by the bye, I hope you