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Of all the multifarious productions which the efforts of superior genius, or the
labours of scholastic industry, have crowded upon the world, none are perused with
more insatiable avidity, or disseminated with more universal applause, than the
narrations of feigned events, descriptions of imaginary scenes, and delineations of
ideal characters. The celebrity of other authors is confined within very narrow
limits. The geometrician and divine, the antiquary and the critic, however
distinguished by uncontested excellence, can only hope to please those whom a
conformity of disposition has engaged in similar pursuits; and must be content to be
regarded by the rest of the world with the smile of frigid indifference, or the
contemptuous sneer of self-sufficient folly. The collector of shells and the
anatomist of insects is little inclined to enter into theological disputes: the
divine is not apt to regard with veneration the uncouth diagrams and tedious
calculations of the astronomer: the man whose life
It is, however, easy to account for this enchantment. To follow the chain of
perplexed ratiocination, to view with critical skill the airy architecture of
systems, to unravel the web of sophistry, or weigh the merits of opposite
hypotheses, requires perspicacity, and pre-supposes learning. Works of this kind,
therefore, are not so well adapted to the generality of readers as familiar and
colloquial composition; for few can reason, but all can feel; and many who cannot
enter into an argument, may yet listen to a tale. The writer of romance has even an
advantage over those who endeavour to amuse by the play of fancy; who, from the
fortuitous collision of dissimilar ideas, produce the scintillations of wit; or by
the vivid glow of poetical imagery delight the imagination
It is, indeed, no ways extraordinary that the mind should be charmed by fancy, and
attracted by pleasure; but that we should listen with complacence to the groans of
misery, and delight to view the exacerbations of complicated anguish, that we should
choose to chill the bosom with imaginary fears, and dim the eyes with fictitious
sorrow, seems a kind of paradox of the heart, and can only be credited because it is
universally felt. Various are the hypotheses which have been formed to account for
the disposition of the mind to riot in this species of intellectual luxury. Some
have imagined that we are induced to acquiesce with greater patience in our own lot
by beholding pictures of life tinged with deeper horrors, and loaded with more
excruciating calamities; as, to a person suddenly emerging out of a dark room, the
faintest glimmering of twilight assumes a lustre from the contrasted gloom. Others,
with yet deeper refinement, suppose that we take upon ourselves this burden of
adscititious sorrows, in order to feast upon the consciousness of our own virtue. We
commiserate others, say they, that we may applaud ourselves; and the sigh of
compassionate sympathy is always followed by the gratulations of self-complacent
esteem. But surely