you a suitable return.' 'I have observed,' he continued,* your curiosity to learn my adventures, and would have gratified it long since, but my mind shrank from the mere contemplation; and I felt how hard a task it would prove to relate them.'
"'In case you had done it,' said I, 'you should, at any rate, have had my sympathies in your misfortunes, and such consolation as I was able to offer.'
"'Some minds,' he replied, 'derive more pleasure from the play of their own sympathies, than from those of their friends, which are apt to be mingled with too great a spice of idle curiosity; and perhaps such is the case with my own. You shall hear my misfortunes, however, and then you will be better able to judge, whether, as they arose in part from my own indiscretions, they do or do not merit your sympathy.'
(To be concluded in our next.)
HISTORICAL AND DRAMATIC FICTIONS.
"Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,
Quàm quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."-Hor. A. P. 180.
It would be difficult, in the catalogue of human instincts, to put the finger upon one of stronger power or more universal prevalence, than the love of fiction; or, more correctly expressed, perhaps, the love of narrative. Not an exotic, the seedling of a cultivated nursery, the product of a luxurious hot-bed, nor the peculiar growth of this country, or of that zone, or of either hemisphere, can this hardy instinct be considered; but a plant that springs up alike beside the lichen of Lapland, or under the bread-fruit of Tonga, indigenous in every climate, a native of the world.
When was the age, what the nation, that might claim exemption from its power? How far back must we trace man's history, to find the time when national and domestic traditions ceased to exist, or failed to interest? Whither must we travel in search of that nation, degraded even below curiosity, where the rude legend kindles not the eye, arrests not the breath, of the listener? We must forget the fables and tragedies of Greece, the parables of Judea, the romances of chivalry, the mysteries and pageants of the dark ages, no less than the fashionable tales and modern novels of our own time, if we deny, that it always has been, as still it is, natural for mankind
to desire and delight in that which presents to their senses suc-