"
As a rest from toil and a relaxation from graver pursuits, the
perusal of a well-written story, by a writer of genius, is a high
intellectual pleasure; and it is a description of literature to
which all classes of readers, old and young, are attracted as by a
powerful instinct; nor would we have any of them debarred from its
enjoyment in a reasonable degree. But to make it the exclusive
literary diet, as some do,--to devour the garbage with which the
shelves of circulating libraries are filled,--and to occupy the
greater portion of the leisure hours in studying the preposterous
pictures of human life which so many of them present, is worse than
waste of time: it is positively pernicious. The habitual novel-
reader indulges in fictitious feelings so much, that there is great
risk of sound and healthy feeling becoming perverted or benumbed.
"I never go to hear a tragedy," said a gay man once to the
Archbishop of York, "it wears my heart out." The literary pity
evoked by fiction leads to no corresponding action; the
susceptibilities which it excites involve neither inconvenience nor
self-sacrifice; so that the heart that is touched too often by the
fiction may at length become insensible to the reality. The steel
is gradually rubbed out of the character, and it insensibly loses
its vital spring.
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