Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love
them--almost all women;--a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Why,
one of the most learned physicians in England said to me only yesterday,
'I have just read _So-and-So_ for the second time' (naming one of
Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges, bishops, chancellors,
mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as well as young boys and
sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.--W. M. THACKERAY.
_Roundabout Papers: On a Lazy Idle Boy._