In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand. Behind him the desert sandwaste stretched interminable, reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets, from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the face of the cliffs which walled in the opposite side of the narrow glen below, were cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks and half-cut pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries before; the sand was slipping down and piling up around them; their heads were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence, desolation, the grave of a dead nation in a dying land. And there he sat musing above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty, a young Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin, bound with a leathern girdle. His long, black locks, unshorn from childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and sinewy, sun-burnt limbs told of labor and endurance; his flashing eyes and beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere of action in such a place. What did his glorious young humanity alone among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow, as if to sweep away some gathering dream, and, sighing, rose and wandered along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and cranny, in search of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.

Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of the low, arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood from some deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and scarcer around Abbot Pambo's Laura at Scetis, and long before Philammon had collected his daily quantity, he had strayed further from his home than he had ever been before.

Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to him, a temple carven in the sandstone cliff; and in front, a smooth platform, strewn with beams and mouldering tools, and here and there a skull bleaching among the sand, perhaps of

some workman slaughtered at his labor in one of the thousand wars of old. . . . He looked past them, into the temple halls, into a lustrous abyss of cool, green shade, deepening on and inward, pillar after pillar, vista after vista, into deepest night. And dimly through the gloom he could descry, on every wall and column, gorgeous arabesques, long lines of pictured story; triumphs and labors; rows of captives in foreign and fantastic dresses, leading strange animals, bearing the tributes of unknown lands; rows of ladies at feast, their heads crowned with garlands, the fragrant lotus-flower in every hand, while slaves brought wine and perfumes, and children sat upon their knees, and husbands by their sides; and dancing-girls in transparent robes and golden. girdles tossed their tawny limbs wildly among the throng. What was the meaning of it all? Why had it all been? Why had it gone on thus, the great world, century after century, millennium after millennium, eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and knowing nothing better . . . how could they know anything better? Their forefathers had lost the light ages and ages before they were born. . . . And Christ had not come for ages and ages after they were dead. . . How could they know? And yet they were all in hell Was the thought bearable?

every one of them.

-was it possible? Millions upon millions burning forever for Adam's fall. Could God be just in that?

REFERENCES.

See list at close of Chapter VIII.

CHAPTER VII.

FICTION-II. THE NOVEL.

Origin of the Novel-Don Quixote-The Grand Cyrus-Countess de la Fayette Aphra Behn-Daniel Defoe-Samuel Richardson-Henry Fielding-Tobias Smollett-Laurence Sterne-Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield-Adventures of David Simple-Other Novels of the Gil Blas Class-Miss Burney's Novels-Godwin's Caleb Williams-Maria Edgeworth-Sir Walter Scott's Novels-Guy Mannering-The Heart of Midlothian-Scott's Last Works-Jane Austen-Theodore HookThe Pickwick Papers-Other Novels of Charles Dickens-William Makepeace Thackeray-Dickens and Thackeray Contrasted-Charlotte Brontë-Lord Lytton-Pelham-Eugene Aram-Benjamin Dis. raeli, Lord Beaconsfield-Charles Kingsley-George Eliot-Ameri can Fiction-Charles Brockden Brown-Wieland-James Fenimore Cooper-Nathaniel Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter Of Novels in

General.

THAT species of prose fiction known as the novel is a comparatively modern outgrowth of the romance. Its excellence depends not upon the amusement or the exaltation which it affords to the imagination of the reader, but upon its truthful delineations of real life, its descriptions of character, its minute and subtle analysis of motives and results. "We find there a close imitation of men and manners," says Hazlitt; "we see the very web and texture of society as it really exists. If poetry has 'something more divine in it,' this savors more of humanity. We imbibe our notions of virtue and vice from practical examples, and are taught a knowledge of the world. through the airy medium of fiction. As a record of past manners and opinions, too, such writings afford the best and fullest information. Extremes are said

to meet; and the works of imagination, as they are called, sometimes come the nearest to truth and nature. Fielding,

in speaking on this subject, and vindicating the use and dignity of the style of writing in which he excelled against the loftier pretensions of professed historians, says that in their productions nothing is true but the names and dates, whereas in the novelist's writings everything is true but the names and dates.' If so, he has the advantage on his side."

Schlegel traces the modern novel to the influence exerted over literature in France, Germany, and England by that inimitable Spanish story, Don Quixote. In this work we find the elements which characterize the modern novel

matchless perfection of style and representation, brilliant wit, and life-like portraiture of character and manners" -preponderating completely over the imaginative and highly-colored conceits which distinguish the MiddleAge romance. Don Quixote was first published in 1605; its popularity was great, even at the first, and, after the lapse of nearly three centuries, the public appreciation of it is not in the least diminished. "It is to Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspeare to England; the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations and countless editions of them in every language bespeak its adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to withhold his admiration: no reader has ventured to confess a want of relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have, age after age, taken delight."

Hallam is of opinion that the society novel originated with Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie, two French romances, written by Mademoiselle de Scudéry about 1650. These works are very saurians in dimensions, and "more dreary than the human brain can now conceive;" and their only merit consists in their truthful delineation of manners and society, and the speaking likenesses which they present of the fashionable beaux and belles of Paris in the early years of Louis XIV. The Countess de la Fayette, a con

temporary of Mademoiselle Scudéry, wrote, towards the close of the seventeenth century, a shorter novel called The Princess of Cleves, which probably more than any former work exerted great influence towards creating a taste for this species of fiction. Boileau, writing of the Countess de la Fayette, called her the woman of all France who had the most wit and who wrote the best; Rochefoucauld described her as the "most genuine person in the world" Sainte-Beuve declares that, among the earlier novels, The Princess of Cleves "has survived them all, and remains the first, in point of time, of our delightful fictions."

Of Mrs. Aphra Behn, the first writer of novels in English, and of her works, no such words of praise can be employed. The works of Cervantes and of the French novelists had created a taste and a demand for fiction of this class; and Mrs. Behn, without any conscious efforts at imitation, wrote merely to supply this demand and to gratify this taste. She wrote, too, for the amusement of the wits and ladies of the corrupt and licentious court of Charles II., and the coarseness and want of delicacy with. which her works are characterized, and which long ago banished them from our reading-tables, must be ascribed to this fact. Of the several novels written by Mrs. Behn, the only one now worthy of mention is Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave,* a story of Surinam. This tale is said to be founded upon facts with which the author was personally acquainted, and relates the history of an African prince who was sold into slavery, and whose nobility and pride leading him to rebel against his master's authority, resulted in causing him to be brutally put to death. It is our first Uncle Tom's Cabin, "the first book in our literature that stirred English blood with a sense of the negro's suffering in slavery." Mrs. Behn's society novels, from reasons already given, are now no longer read. "Speculative as regards

*Published in 1698.