Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Thackerayraspberries and cream disappeared before the philosopher.You take the allegory? Novels are sweets. All peoplewith healthy literary appetites love them—almost allwomen;—a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Why,one of the most learned physicians in England said to meonly yesterday, “I have just read So-and-So for the secondtime” (naming one of Jones’s exquisite fictions).Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notoriousnovel-readers; as well as young boys and sweet girls,and their kind, tender mothers. Who has not read aboutEldon, and how he cried over novels every night when hewas not at whist?As for that lazy naughty boy at Chur, I doubt whetherHE will like novels when he is thirty years of age. He istaking too great a glut of them now. He is eating jellyuntil he will be sick. He will know most plots by thetime he is twenty, so that HE will never be surprisedwhen the Stranger turns out to be the rightful earl,—when the old waterman, throwing off his beggarly gabardine,shows his stars and the collars of his variousorders, and clasping Antonia to his bosom, proves himselfto be the prince, her long-lost father. He will recognizethe novelist’s same characters, though they appearin red-heeled pumps and ailes-de-pigeon, or the garb ofthe nineteenth century. He will get weary of sweets, asboys of private schools grow (or used to grow, for I havedone growing some little time myself, and the practicemay have ended too)—as private school-boys used togrow tired of the pudding before their mutton at dinner.And pray what is the moral of this apologue? The moralI take to be this: the appetite for novels extending tothe end of the world; far away in the frozen deep, thesailors reading them to one another during the endlessnight;—far away under the Syrian stars, the solemnsheikhs and elders hearkening to the poet as he reciteshis tales; far away in the Indian camps, where the soldierslisten to ——’s tales, or ——’s, after the hot day’smarch; far away in little Chur yonder, where the lazyboy pores over the fond volume, and drinks it in withall his eyes;—the demand being what we know it is,9