unsurpassed. The race that produced it has now swelled in this country alone to nearly sixty-five millions. We boast loudly of our largely increased machinery for education, our monstrous and numerous libraries, our extraordinary spread of intelligence, our immense advances in learning and knowledge, our wide range and extension of thought; we lay the whole world under contribution, and print a thousand volumes where those who gave us our permanent literature printed one-and yet, in the whole of it, what and how many real additions have we made to that literature? Who and how many are the living writers who have contributed anything to it that will live in after-time, or whose names will be likely to be remembered when they have been fifty years dead? Where are our poets, our dramatists, our historians, our essayists, our philosophers, our really capable critics?

These are questions that every one can answer for himself. It is the object of the present suggestions to ask them, not to answer them, nor to challenge the claim to distinction that any person may think belongs to him. There can be no juster commentary upon current literature than results from taking a lantern and honestly searching for its great men among the multitude of its disciples. A few will doubtless be found-some of them beyond the iron gate of threescore years and ten. But how few and far between in such a countless army of authors let each observer judge for himself.

Popular literature nowadays consists in large part of fiction, of which the authors are more prolific than the Australian rabbit. Now, that fiction may be, to

a certain limited extent, one of the most charming as well as wholesome forms of literary production will not at this day be questioned. Poetry may be expressed in prose as well as in verse. And how deftly in either form the golden thread of romance can be wrought by enchanted hands into the web of human life some names attest that always will be household words wherever the English tongue is spoken. But the everlasting repetition, through countless thousands of volumes, of the story of the imaginary courtship and marriage of fictitious and impossible young men and women; and when all conceivable incidents that could attend this happy narrative are used up, and the exhausted imagination of the narrator refuses any further supply, then in their place an endless flow of commonplace and vapid conversation, tending to the same matrimonial result, until it is clear that the parties, if they were real, would talk themselves to death-this is the staple of what is now well called fiction, because it never could exist in fact. What a food for an immortal mind to live on, year in and year out, as its principal literary nourishment! And what sort of mental fibre is it likely to produce? Is it from such nutriment that are to be expected the robust and vigorous masculinity that should belong to the American man, or the finer but equally healthy and sound qualities that should distinguish the American woman? The taste for this kind of food is the morbid appetite produced by long nourishment upon pastry and slops. A healthy stomach would reject it.

But though such a craving widely exists, and grows by what it feeds on, very much of the circulation of this kind of literature is due to the ingenious exer

tions of the publisher. Each successive production is "pushed" and "noticed" so as to be brought for its brief moment into the public attention. For a few days or weeks it is made to be more or less talked about and written about, before it is supplanted by a new and similar work of genius. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, read the book because it is talked about, and they are ashamed to say they are not acquainted with it. Not to have read the "Washerwoman of the Pyrenees," or "The Jack of Trumps," or "Peter's Wife's Sister," while they happen to be in vogue, would indicate a want of literary culture. So the reader who has no time to make acquaintance, and never does make acquaintance, with the really choice literature of his language, who only knows by name the great authors he has never read, toils in vain to keep up with the contents of his circulating library, which offers him a fresh bill of fare every month; quite unmindful that each one of these butterfly celebrities, after its nine days of popularity, disappears and is heard of no more, altogether eclipsed by the equally ephemeral glitter of its successor. It is a very characteristic anecdote that is told of a young ladies' seminary in England, whose pupils, being asked who is the greatest writer in the English language, unanimously named Shakespeare; being next inquired of who was their favorite author, replied, by a large majority, "Edna Lyall."

It is undeniable that, outside of a certain limited class of scholarly and thoughtful people, the great majority of all who read anything except the newspapers, read books of this description. The statistics of popular and circulating libraries show that seventy

five per cent. of all the books taken out are novels of recent production. A library for the general public that did not furnish them could not be sustained, whatever real treasures of knowledge and literature it might offer. Probably the most numerous readers of novels are to be found among women, perhaps because they have more time and fewer other diversions than men. In the large class of them who derive their ideas of life and of the world from this source, the result is seen in the enormous and increasing business of the divorce courts, of which they and their husbands are the principal patrons. Aside from the loose and vague notions of morality that become familiar to them, unconsciously, from the books they read, they enter upon married life with ideas and expectations so false and theories so absurd that nothing but disappointment and unhappiness can follow. Instead of the impossible and self-sacrificing heroes of their dreams, they awake to find themselves married only to men, with the imperfections common to humanity. They perceive that the perfection they are in search of is to be found in other women's husbands, not in their own; on which point they would be speedily undeceived if they could exchange situations with their apparently more fortunate sisters. It is not long before both parties to a union that has proved a disappointment are ready to escape from it; or, if not, one or the other is determined to break away. It is probable that all other causes put together are not so prolific of divorce among the class in which it commonly takes place as the fact that its women are brought up on novels of a low grade as their habitual and almost only reading. To the heterogeneous mass of bookmaking outside

of fiction that is poured out upon us, it is hardly necessary to advert. He who runs may read it, though for the most part he had much better not. Much of it is characterized by haste, superficiality, and redundancy of words which the writers lack the time and the thought necessary to condense; which often would not repay condensation, or would disappear in the process. Speculation on all subjects, too hazy for comprehension, spurious philosophy, theology that is religion's worst enemy, political science invented to serve the ends of a party or to cater to a popular prejudice, useless erudition in all its numerous departments, catchpenny treatises and compilations made to sell, or to air the cranks of their authors or further their ambition for notoriety-all the forms and infinite variety of "books that are not books." Among its best features are the writings that elucidate physical and scientific discovery. That it presents other excellent exceptions to its general quality only makes that the more apparent.

Book-making has become a trade. Profit is its chief end. The day of studious and self-denying lives devoted to study and to thought, and regardless of gain, is almost gone by. Literature is no longer "cultivated upon a little oatmeal," nor for its own sake on any fare. Men do not write because they are charged with a message to humanity that has been mellowed and tempered by long reflection, by communion with nature and the higher influences of the soul. To catch the ear of the public by a lucky hit or device, to take a popular tide at the flood, to dash off something or compile something that will sell, and if a success of this sort attracts attention to the name