In reading either of them we forget that the work is as instructive as it is imaginative.
The most vehement longing of our times, however, is manifestly after a faithful mirror of the present; that is to say, after a life-picture of the social relations and the struggles to which the evils of the present day have given rise.

We feel that great events are being enacted; that greater still are in preparation; and we long for an epic, a world-moulding epic, to imbody and depict them.

The undertaking is a dangerous one--many a lance is shivered in the first encounter.

A mere tendency-novel is in itself a monster.

A picture of the age must be, in the highest acceptation of the word, a poem.