All the rest is eminently
good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the
"Beggar" that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct, and like a
lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader while he is
imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult
in being told, "I will teach you how to think upon this subject." This
fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in
Sterne, and in many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a
sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming
their readers to be stupid,--very different from "Robinson Crusoe," the
"Vicar of Wakefield," "Roderick Random," and other beautiful, bare
narratives. There is implied, an unwritten compact between author and
reader: "I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it."
Modern novels, "St. Leons" and the like, are full of such flowers as
these,--"Let not my reader suppose;" "Imagine, if you can, modest," etc,
I will here have done with praise and blame, I have written so much only
that you may not think I have passed over your book without
observation.... I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his "Ancient
Marinere," a "Poet's Reverie;" it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's
declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation
of a lion.
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