of manner, a quiet dignity of style, which, while it impresses all readers by its calm purity, appeals more especially to the cultivated and refined. Restful is, perhaps, the term that can best be applied to her writings. She does not look deep down into the inner conflicts, the great moral struggles of our nature from which George Eliot draws back the veil; nor can she reach the pure and lofty air of poetic inspiration in which George MacDonald soars; she does not even give us the broad, pleasant, infinite variety of human character and life which Anthony Trollope depicts, but she takes some quiet corner of the earth, which is planted with roses perhaps, or perhaps brings forth thorns and briers chiefly, and she says: "See, men and women have lived and suffered here. Be patient and steadfast, you who live and suffer; endure as they endured, and you also will find rest and peace. Do right, do your duty, and be patient: all must be well, for God is over all."

Very pathetic is this teaching, very powerful too in its earnest, absolute purity and goodness; for this is an author whose pages are unsullied by any taint. Good is good, and evil is evil; she believes in no doubtful border-land, no debateable ground between the two, and thinks that evil is not to be palliated or extenuated. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a pure moral tone in the literature of fiction; for the influence of fiction on the manners and morals of a nation is almost incalculable-it acts most powerfully either for good or evil. A writer of fiction having first excited the imagination or kindled the enthusiasm of readers, who are for the most part young and susceptible, can present them with an image of exalted virtue or of vice made attractive, which shall be all-powerful in its after-effects. It is no mean task to make the timid trust in God, and to help the trustful to hope; to make those who hope strong in faith, and the faithful victorious.

evil and not for good. So far as he is able to act upon his generation he will leave it shallower, more flippant, more tolerant of evil, and indifferent to good than he finds it. And yet what is the aim of a great number of authors of the present day? Mainly to amuse indolent and languid people, and to excite in them a glow of feeling. As pain is a coarser and stronger stimulant than pleasure, they use crime and suffering as a goad to quicken the attention of the reader. At the same time many of the writers of "sensation" novels give the homage which vice pays to virtue, by acknowledging that the outer form of virtue is desirable. Their "Lady Audleys" and "Aurora Floyds" assume even to themselves an air of innocence. They are worshippers of the world and the flesh, but beyond this they hesitate to advance.

It is reserved for Mr. Wilkie Collins alone to glorify and embody the world, the flesh, and the devil. In Armadale, the Woman in White, and others, we have an incarnation of every evil. These books do not teach a disbelief in purity and goodness, for the simple reason that they show no purity and goodness in which to disbelieve. So far as they contain any recognition of a high intelligence, it is embodied in the detective police. The world is shown to be a world of force and fraud and universal devilry, held fitfully in check by the police in plain clothes. It is notable in works like these that any man or woman who stands in any way apart from, or struggles against, the general moral depravity is represented as either maniac or monomaniac. The character of virtuous men or women seems, however, to offer less difficulty. Virtue appears to be the negation of character and intellect, and to mean the non-commission of crime. If, in addition to the non commission of crime, a man or woman acts like a born fool, that is a virtuous man or woman. The gradations of character and intellect are born fool, monomaniac, clever villain-male or A writer of fiction who neglects his female. The interest of such stories is high vocation, and accepts only the low the interest of vicious natures, unbridled one of paid entertainer-paid to amuse passions, and open licentiousness; at the or excite, careless of means or result- last come in the detective police, cleverer, commits a crime against the age in which more wicked, more unscrupulous than he lives, and against all future ages. So the criminals whom they hunt down. far as he has any influence, he uses it for The "Miss Gwilts" and "Mother Older