the reader about the necessity of a deviation is often false, because he cannot know before the catastrophe what is necessary, and what not, to the systematic development of the situation; and when after the catastrophe he reads the book again—of books which one reads but once I do not speak—and even then thinks that this or that digression could have been omitted without marring the impression of the whole, the question remains whether he would have had the same impression of the whole if the author had not conducted him thither in a more or less artificial manner, just by means of the digressions which seem to him to be superfluous.
Do you think that the death of Amy Robsart would have touched you, if you had been a stranger in the halls of Kenilworth? And do you think that there is no connexion—connexion through contrast—between the rich dress wherein the unworthy Leicester showed himself to her, and the blackness of his soul? Do you not understand that Leicester—every one knows this who is acquainted with him from other sources than the novel only—was infinitely worse than he was painted in Kenilworth? But the great novelist, who liked better to charm by an artistic arrangement of colours than by coarseness of colour, thought it beneath him to dip his brush in all the mud and all the blood that clung to the unworthy favourite of Elizabeth. He wished to point out only one spot in the mud-pool; but he knew
