destroying the just proportions of a story, and forfeiting that subtle sympathy with life, as it is, which gives to every artistic masterpiece its admirable air of self-sufficing and harmonious repose. "I always tremble when I see a philosophical idea attached to a novel," said Sainte-Beuve, who was spared by the kindly hand of death from the sight of countless novels attached to philosophical ideas. Charles Lamb, with that unerring intuition which was the most wonderful thing about his indolent luminous genius, recognized, even in the comparative sunlight of his day, the growing shadow of a speculative, disciplinal, analytic literature which should sadly overrate its own responsibilities and importance. "We turn away," he said, "from the real essences of things to hunt after their relative shadows, moral duties; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly represented, the relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name of a science." No one understood more thoroughly than Lamb that the purely natural point of view, as apart from the purely ethical point of view, supplies the proper basis for all imaginative
