Isaac Taylor on Novel-Reading.
ZEST! How may it most effectually be dissipated, how irrecoverably lost? Forgive me now this wrong, if conscience driven, as I am, I utter what must, I know, offend some who read this paper. Genuine zest disappears wherever fiction holds sway. I am intending no onslaught on novel-reading. I have no Puritanic horror of novels. I have listened to most of those that were the popular fictions of that by-gone time. I would say this only to the heads of families: Make your choice—freely admit from the circulating library the three-volume novels of the season, and then be content to find that all residue of zest is gone as to history or biography, or science, or anything else that is real and genuine, Christianity included. Novel-reading is an infatuation which masters souls as surely as dram-drinking does. Many are the melancholy spectacles which one encounters in towns; as for instance a woman, wasted, worn, in tatters, and near to starvation—that is a sad sight. And so it is sad to meet the well-dressed lady of forty or fifty, hastening home with the three greasy-boarded volumes, which are all to be devoured between the noon of to-day and the dawn of to-morrow! The alternative for the individuals or the family is this: Novel-reading with its consequent ennui and utter apathy, or else genuine feeling, employment with zest, as to whatever is real in life, in history, in science, in poetry, and in general literature. Fiction of any sort in one scale, and reality in the other, the beam will never stand on the level.—Littell's Living Age.