ABSTRACT
I have been invited to write upon my 'Favorite Novel.' Ahs, I have so many favorite novels! How can I incur the jealousy of all the others by selecting one as the favorite? Novels arc live things; they love admiration; they resent neglect; they hate the preference of others. Like Charles Lamb, who loved every book because it was a bookexcept the Law List-I love every novel because it is a novel-except those which arc not novels, but only shams. I love the novel of adventure; I find the Three Musketeers as delightful now as when I sat in a corner, breathless, panting, and followed, all a lifelong holiday, the fortunes of the Immortal Three who were Four. And I love the novel which portrays human life and society, whether it is Tom Jones, or Hu111plzrey Cliuker, or Nicholas Nickleby. And I love Charlotte Yonge' s gentle girls; and Marryat' s anything but gentle sailor; and Lever's swaggering soldier; and Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth, and Wilkie Collins, and Charles Reade, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes-not to speak of living men and women by the score whose works I read with joy.
