impressions that fall upon the young mind the more certain it is that
the greatest strength of natural tendency will be touched and revealed.
Good or bad, whichever it may be, let it come out as quickly as
possible. How many men have never developed their fatal weaknesses until
success was within reach and the edifice fell upon other innocent ones.
Believe me, no innate scoundrel or brute will be much helped or hindered
by stories. These have no turn or leisure for dreaming. They are eager
for the actual touch of life. What would a dull-eyed glutton, famishing,
not with hunger but with the cravings of digestive ferocity, find in
Thackeray's "Memorials of Gormandizing" or "Barmecidal Feasts?" Such
banquets are spread for the frugal, not one of whom would swap that
immortal cook-book review for a dinner with Lucullus. Rascals will not
read. Men of action do not read. They look upon it as the gambler does
upon the game where "no money passes." It may almost be said that the
capacity for novel-reading is the patent of just and noble minds. You
never heard of a great novel-reader who was notorious as a criminal.
There have been literary criminals, I grant you--Eugene Aram Dr. Dodd,
Prof. Webster, who murdered Parkmaan, and others. But they were writers,
not readers And they did not write novels. Mr. Aram wrote scientific and
school books, as did Prof. Webster, and Dr. Wainwright wrote beautiful
sermons. We never do sufficiently consider the evil that lies behind
writing sermons. The nearest you can come to a writer of fiction who
has been steeped in crime is in Benvenuto Cellini, whose marvelous
autobiographical memoir certainly contains some fiction, though it is
classed under the suspect department of History.

How many men actually have been saved from a criminal career by the
miraculous influence of novels? Let who will deny, but at the age of six
I myself was absolutely committed to the abandoned purpose of riding
barebacked horses in a circus. Secretly, of course, because there were