STANDARD NOVELS
AND
ROMANCES.
This popular Work has now reached its Tenth Number, and has every where obtained approval and encouragement.
No kind of literature is so generally attractive as Fiction. Pictures of life and manners, and Stories of adventure, are more eagerly received by the many, than graver productions, however important these latter may be to the instruction of mankind. Apuleius is better remembered by his Fable of Cupid and Psyche, than by his abstruser Platonic writings; and the Decameron of Boccaccio has outlived the Latin treatises, and other learned works of that author.
But well-wrought fiction is characterised not alone by amusement: it is made subservient to the purposes of instruction, in acquainting us with the hearts and motives of our fellow-creatures—in familiarising us with many-coloured life among ourselves and in distant lands—in telling us what it is best to imitate—in warning us what we ought to shun, and in demonstrating, by its almost living examples, the fatal consequences of rashness and vice. To the young, in particular, the lessons afforded by good fictions are inestimable; and the young will eagerly receive advice thus proffered. It is therefore more necessary in novel-writing, than in any other branch of literature, that the utmost care should be bestowed in the selection of incidents destined to be indelibly impressed on the youthful mind; the danger of doing wrong being in proportion to the power of the writer, and the popula-
