ten, rather than dandled into insulting prominence; and that not all the dreary vices of the most drearily vicious man or woman whom Zola ever drew can give that man or woman a right to breathe in the tranquil air of fiction. As for accepting inartistic and repellent sinners for the sake of the moral lesson which may, or may not, be drawn from their sin, Mr. Wilde is as prompt as De Quincey himself to repudiate any such utilitarian theory. "If you insist on my telling you what is the moral of the Iliad," says De Quincey, "I must insist on your telling me what is the moral of a rattlesnake, or the moral of Niagara. I suppose the moral is, that you must get out of their way if you mean to moralize much longer."
But this light-hearted flippancy on the part of the critic was only possible, or at least was only acceptable, in those days when the novelist had not yet awakened to his serious duties in life. Content, for the most part, to tell a story, he barely remembered now and then, in the beginning, may be, or at the end, that there was such a thing as an ethical purpose in existence. Even Richardson, the father of English didactic fiction, was but an
