I have, therefore, little opportunity of judging whether the characters depicted by some of our later serialists, are exact copies from nature or the reverse. I have, however, heard several young ladies declare them to be extremely natural, though I confess to have been somewhat puzzled as to their means of accurate information. But I may be allowed _en passant_ to remark, that it seems difficult to imagine what kind of pleasure can be derived from the description of a scene, which, if actually contemplated by the reader, would inspire him with loathing and disgust, or from conversations in which the brutal alternates with the positive obscene. The fetid den of the Jew, the stinking cellar of the thief, the squalid attic of the prostitute, are not haunts for honest men, and the less that we know of them the better. Such places no doubt exist--the more is the pity; but so do dunghills, and a hundred other filthy things, which the imagination shudders at whenever they are forced upon it,--for the man who willingly and deliberately dwells upon such subjects, is, notwithstanding all pretext, in heart and soul a nightman! Don't tell me about close painting after nature. Nature is not always to be painted as she really is. Would you hang up such paintings in your drawing-room? If not, why suffer them in print to lie upon your drawing-room tables? What are Eugene Sue and his English competitors, but coarser and more prurient Ostades?
Oh, but there is a moral in these things! No doubt of it. There is a moral in all sin and misery, as there is in all virtue and happiness. There is a moral every where, and the veriest bungler cannot fail to seize it. But is that a reason why the minds of our sons and daughters should be polluted by what is notoriously the nearest thing to contact with absolute vice--namely, vivid and graphic descriptions of it by writers of undenied ability? Did _Life in London_, or the exploits of Tom, Jerry, and Logic, make the youth of the metropolis more staid, or inspire them with a wholesome horror of dissipation? Did the memoirs of Casanova ever reclaim a rake--the autobiography of David Haggart convert an aspiring pickpocket--or the daring feats of Jack Sheppard arrest one candidate for the gallows? These are the major cases; but look at the minor ones. What are the favourite haunts of the heroes in even the most blameless of our serials? Pot-houses--cigariums--green-rooms of theatres--hells--spunging-houses--garrets--and the scullery! Nice and improving all this--isn't it, Smith?--for the young and rising generation! No need now for surreptitious works, entitled, "A Guide to the Larks of London," or so forth, which used formerly to issue from the virgin press of Holywell Street. Almost any serial will give hints enough to an acute boy, if he wishes to gain an initiative knowledge of subjects more especially beneath the cognisance of the police. They will at least guide him to the door with the red lamp burning over it, and only one plank betwixt its iniquity and the open street. And all this is for a moral! Heaven knows, Smith, I am no Puritan; but when I think upon the men who now call themselves the lights of the age, and look back upon the past, I am absolutely sick at heart, and could almost wish for a return of the days of Mrs Radcliffe and the Castle of Otranto.