But readers are more exacting now. And we are all frightfully
sagacious. Long reading of novels gives a fatal skill in anticipating
their issues. If in the first chapter the poor little brother runs away
to sea, his anxious friends may bewail his loss, but we remain calm in
the conviction that he will return, yellow and rich, precisely in time
to frustrate the designs of the wicked, and to reward innocence and
constancy with ten thousand a year. All the good people in a story may
be puzzled to detect the author of an alarming fraud; but we know
better, and, fixing with more than a detective's accuracy upon the
gentlemanly, plausible villain, drag him forth long before our author
is ready to present him to our (theoretically) astonished eyes. The
whole village may be deceived by the venerable stranger, with his white
hair and benevolent spectacles, but our unerring eye instantly discerns
in him Black Donald, the robber-captain; and if we do not tremble for
our heroine, it is only because we are morally certain that her deadly
peril is only an excuse for her inevitable lover's "dashing up on a
coal-black barb, urged to his utmost speed," and delivering the
desolate fair, who has won our regard alike by her indignant virtue,
and the skill with which, while laboring under uncontrollable
agitation, she constructs sentences so ponderous and intricate that Mr.
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