ABSTRACT
Pendennis is ended; a supply of pleasure and wisdom, anticipated from month to month by many eager votaries, has ceased to flow; the last two bottles of this double dozen of fine-flavoured well-matured wine, have been sent in and drunk, and we must now patiently wait for a renewal of the stock. The readers of periodical novels contract a certain habit of exaction towards the authors who serve up their works in courses of two or three chapters at a time; they come to fancy that the feast should be perpetually renewed. When three volumes of fiction are devoured together, a certain time is felt to be necessary for the repose of both writer and reader, but when the former doles out the portions slowly, the latter is willing that they should be ‘continued.’ We wonder whether a clever romancist might not profitably take advantage of this feeling, and carry on a work for a series of years, either by spinning it out into seven or eight volumes, after Richardson, or by continually grafting one story to another, and interlacing the threads of interest in the fashion of the Arabian Nights.
