ABSTRACT
The popular novel of modern times is perhaps too well known to need a definition. Still it may be proper, in reference to the acquisition of just standards, to throw out some general considerations in regard to this peculiar structure in art. The history of the novel is a very simple one. Even in childhood, however, the faculty is an extraordinary one. It betrays talents which are by no means shared by many. Not one child in the hundred possesses the endowment, or certainly to no great extent. They may possess large faculties of thought and of expression. It is this ready faith in the auditory which determines the legitimacy of the art—which has been practised from the beginning of time, in all the nations and all the ages of the earth. No people have ever lived without their authors of fictitious narrative.
