Excerpt from The Yale Literary Magazine, Vol. 40: November, 1874In reading the true novel you are identified with many of its characters. For the time being you live their life, you hope and despond with them. But the deceit of the stage is never so perfect. The greatest triumph of the actor is to make his audience forget that he acts. The novelist, on the other hand, can make you not only forget that his characters are fictitious, but, should you yield to his in¿uence, can make you forget yourself. Both these great and notable prerogatives of the novel, the greater field for the analysis and exposition of life and character, and the greater power of illusion, Mr. Collins has abdi cated. He never introduces one of those impalpable ex pressions of sentiment which, to the bystander himself, would be scarcely apparent. He never throws around us the mantle of deception so successfully as to make us for get our relation to his story.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.