But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic.

There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous.
The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation.
Without the lesson the amusement will not be there.

There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any one.
I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they read.

Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions.

Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother.