hundred and twenty pages in each of the two first
volumes, and three hundred and fifty at least in
the last, and not many lines in any of the pages,
and not many pages in any of the chapters!

For the matter contained in those volumes, it
was generally adventurous, romantic, and full of
love and persecution. There were prolonged and
glowing descriptions of scenery, in which the
words "towering" and "nestling" occurred very
frequently. There were pages of reflection interspersed
among other matters, the author pulling
himself up when he had nothing more to
add, stopping quite abruptly, and saying, as if it
had just occurred to him, "But I am digressing."
On the margin of the page which surrounded
one of these splendid bits of description,
would be written in pencil, "glowing," "life-like,"
"most graphic;" while by the side of the
reflective page would be inscribed in the same
hand—perhaps the author's—"great knowledge
of life shown here;" or, "these are the words of
one who has lived and suffered;" or, "how delightful
to find one's own sentiments, as it were,
reproduced." These descriptions and reflections
were integral and indispensable parts of the
legitimate book, and there were inevitable places
where they were certain to come in. The ignoble
race of skippers—by which I do not mean
merchant captains, but persons who shrink from
their duties, and pass over, perhaps, this very
sentence which I am in the act of writing—the
members of that dastard race knew at a single
glance when a descriptive or reflective portion of
the work under perusal was coming, and jumped
off to the account of the duel in the next chapter
most unremorsefully. For, there were always
some incidents in the book, if you would wait
long enough and take the author's way and time
of letting you get at them.

Consider from how many things that were
once valuable to him the novelist is now shut
out. To take an instance or two. What a
capital incident for the romance-writer was furnished
by that once sufficiently common occurrence,
an elopement. What a chance it was
to describe all the circumstances connected
with a runaway match! When Mr. Calverley
discovered the retreat of Miss Beverley, and
coming in disguise to the village near which was
the residence of the young lady's maiden aunt,
managed at last to establish relations with the
lady's maid, and to convey a note to his mistress,
how exciting the story became. And the preliminaries,
the bribing of innkeepers, of post-boys,
the meetings between Mr. Calverley's confidential
man and Miss Beverley's confidential
maid, to make the necessary arrangements; the
breathless excitement, too, of the attempt itself,
the description of how the evening passed inside
the residence of the maternal aunt, how the
beautiful heroine was unable to do justice to
her meals, how her paleness and agitation were
observed and commented on, and accounted for
by a fictitious encounter with a mad dog in the
course of the previous afternoon, the unusual
determination on the part of the old lady to sit
up later than usual that evening, telling long
stories of her youthful days, and breaking off
from time to time to comment on the inattention
of her auditor—was not all this "good business"?
And then when the maiden aunt and her
suspicious confidential servant were at length
disposed of, how harrowing were the misgivings
of Miss lest her lover should have abandoned all
hope of her coming now that the hour appointed
for their meeting was so long passed, how
pathetic was her last glance round her innocent
bedroom, and how breath-suspending the narrative
of her passing along the corridor on tiptoe,
of her dropping something outside her aunt's
door, of her pausing to listen whether the noise
had awakened the old lady, of her hastening on,
of her safe passage through the pantry window,
of the rain which beat in her face as she emerged
into the garden, and of the long low whistle
emanating from the windpipe of the confidential
valet, announcing that he and his master were
still there and on the look-out.

And the flight, all the incidents of that long
and hurried post-chaise journey, there was a
chance again; the headlong race when another
post-chaise was seen in the distance; the having
to wait for horses at the next stage, when the
fugitives were overtaken by that dreadful post-chaise,
which was found to contain—two gentlemen
of the press hurrying off to attend a public
meeting at Glasgow; the way, too, in which all
difficulties were got over and all obstacles overcome
by the dexterity and fidelity of that confidential
valet, who was of course attached on his
own account to the confidential maid, and by her
egged on to all sorts of prodigious deeds of
valour and cunning—is it not a terrible loss to
have such resources as these withdrawn?

For who ever hears of elopements now?

Or, suppose the novelist to have mounted on
a stronger pinion yet, and to have favoured us
with an abduction instead of an elopement, what
a pull he had over the modern author of romances.
Suppose that the flight was compulsory instead
of voluntary; suppose that the devoted damsel
was walking with her maid with constitutional
views, and that both were suddenly seized by
men with black vizards over their faces and
carried to a post-chaise—that vehicle being for
ever in waiting in the legitimate time—to be
joined at the first stage by the wicked gentleman
who had planned the attack. Suppose the added
excitement and compound interest—so to speak
—of the maiden's misery, her indignant interviews
with her captor, her cries of "unhand me,"
and her demands to be restored to her friends.
Think, again, of all the secret plottings between
mistress and maid in their determination to effect
an escape or die, of the good-natured postboy
who assists them, of the failing of the enterprise,
of the discovery of the abduction by the maiden's
real lover, of his pursuit with all its thrilling
incidents, and of his final triumph over the abducting
villain, whom he slays in fair combat
outside his own castle gate.

Who ever hears of abductions now?

What a delightful thing a journey used to be in
works of fiction. But even the journey by stage or