Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done.

Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized?
Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter?
And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate?
What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment?
When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs.
Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil.

They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader.
"Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister.

There shall be no secret that she can tell you.

Nay, take the third volume if you please--learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other.