Nabokov, in praising the novel, speaks of the room its large form allows to the gratuitous, to "lovely irrelevancy". "What some readers suppose to be trifles not worth stooping to," he tells us, "is what literature actually consists of . . . A great writer's world is a magic democracy where . . . even the most incidental character . . . has the right to live and breed."

Consider this exchange, after some talk about corns and dancing, between the two Capulets in Romeo and Juliet:

Cap: Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet,

For you and I are past our dancing days. How long is't now since last yourself and I Were at a mask?

Cap 2: By'r Lady, thirty years.

Cap: What man? 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much. 'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, Come Pentecost as quickly as it will, Some five and twenty years, and then we masked.

Cap 2: 'Tis more, 'tis more: his son is elder, sir; His son is thirty.

Cap: Will you tell me that?

His son was a ward two years ago.