Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answer. (1) The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every gradation of
increasing tendemess, that there was shortly no fresh proof of it to be given to their friends or themselves (2) They called each other by their Christian name, were
always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set, and if a rainy morning deprived them of other
enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together. (3) Yes, novels: --for I will not adopt that
ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are
themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust (4) Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine
of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? (5) I cannot approve of it. (6) Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their
leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans (7) Let us not desert one another, we are an injured body.
(8) Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition
has been so much decried (9) From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers (10) And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth
abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator,
and a chapter from Stere, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the
novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. (11) 'I am no novel reader seldom look into novels-Do not
imagine that I often read novels/It is really very well for a novel·—(12) Such is the common cant—13) 'And what are you reading. Miss-> (14) 'Oh it is only a
novell" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame (15)-"It is only Cecilla, or Camilla, or Belinda' or, in
short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its
varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
(1818)
In context, the statement "Yes, novels" (sentence 3) does all of the following EXCEPT