this author, I passed on to MALCOLM J. ERRYM (the name to my present scrutiny, suggesting an anagram on Merry), author of Edith the Captive, The Treasures of St. Mark, A Mystery in Scarlet, George Barington, Sea-drift, Townsend the Runner, and a variety of other wellnamed romances. Memory may play me false, but I believe there was a kind of merit about ERRYM. The Mystery in Scarlet runs in my mind to this day; and if any hunter after autographs (and I think the world is full of such) can lay his hands on a copy even imperfect, and will send it to me in the care of Messrs. Scribner, my gratitude (the muse consenting) will even drop into poetry. For I have a curiosity to know what the Mystery in Scarlet was, and to renew acquaintance with King George and his valet Norris, who were the chief figures in the work and may be said to have risen in every page superior to history and the ten commandments. Hence I passed on to Mr. EGAN, whom I trust the reader does not confuse with the author of Tom and Jerry; the two are quite distinct, though I have sometimes suspected they were father and son. I never enjoyed EGAN as I did ERRYM; but this was possibly a want of taste, and EGAN Would do. Thence again I was suddenly brought face to face with Mr. Reynolds. A school-fellow, acquainted with my debasing tastes, supplied me with The Mysteries of London, and I fell back revolted. The same school-fellow (who seems to have been a devil of a fellow) supplied me about the same time with one of those contributions to literature (and even to art) from which the name of the publisher is modestly withheld. It was a far more respectable work than The Mysteries of London. J. F. SMITH when I was a child, ERRYM when I was a boy, HAYWARD when I had attained to man's estate, these I read for pleasure; the others, down to SYLVANUS COBB, I have made it my business to know (as far as my endurance would support me) from a sincere interest in human nature and the art of letters.

IV.

WHAT kind of talent is required to please this mighty public? that was my

A

first question, and was soon amended with the words, "if any." J. F. SMITH was a man of undeniable talent, ERRYM and HAYWARD have a certain spirit, and even in EGAN the very tender might recognize the rudiments of a sort of literary gift; but the cases on the other side are quite conclusive. Take Hemming, or the dull ruffian Reynolds, or Sylvanus Cobb, of whom perhaps I have only seen unfortunate examples they seem not to have the talents of a rabbit, and why anyone should read them is a thing that passes wonder. plain-spoken and possibly high-thinking critic might here perhaps return upon me with my own expressions. And he would have missed the point. For I and my fellows have no such popularity to be accounted for. The reputation of an upper-class author is made for him at dinner-tables and nursed in newspaper paragraphs, and when all is done, amounts to no great matter. We call it popularity, surely in a pleasant error. A flippant writer in the Saturday Review expressed a doubt if I had ever cherished a "genteel" illusion; in truth I never had many, but this was one-and I have lost it. Once I took the literary author at his own esteem; I behold him now like one of those gentlemen who read their own MS. descriptive poetry aloud to wife and babes around the evening hearth; addressing a mere parlor coterie and quite unknown to the great world outside the villa windows. At such pigmy reputation, Reynolds, or COBB, or Mrs. SOUTHWORTH can afford to smile. By spontaneous public vote, at a cry from the unorganic masses, these great ones of the dust were laurelled. And for what?

Ay, there is the question: For what? How is this great honor gained? Many things have been suggested. The people (it has been said) like rapid narrative. If so, the taste is recent, for both Smith and Egan were leisurely writers. It has been said they like incident, not character. I am not so sure. G. P. R. James was an upper-class author, J. F. Smith a penny-press-man; the two are in some ways not unlike; but here is the curiosity-James made far the better story, Smith was far the more successful with his characters.

Each (to bring the parallel home) wrote a novel called The Stepmother; each introduced a pair of old maids; and let anyone study the result! James's Stepmother is a capital tale, but Smith's old maids are like Trollope at his best. It is said again that the people like crime. Certainly they do. But the great ones of the dust have no monopoly of that, and their less fortunate rivals hammer away at murder and abduction unapplauded.

I return to linger about my seaman on the Atlantic liner. I shall be told he is exceptional. I am tempted to think, on the other hand, that he may be normal. The critical attitude, whether to books or life-how if that were the true exception? How if Tom Holt's Log, surreptitiously perused by a harborside, had been the means of sending my mariner to sea? How if he were still unconsciously expecting the Tom Holt part of the business to beginperhaps to-morrow? How, even, if he had never yet awakened to the discrepancy between that singular picture and the facts? Let us take another instance. The Young Ladies' Journal is an elegant miscellany which I have frequently observed in the possession of the barmaid. In a lone house on a moorland, I was once supplied with quite a considerable file of this production and (the weather being violent) devoutly read it. The tales were not ill done; they were well abreast of the average tale in a circulating library; there was only one difference, only one thing to remind me I was in the land of penny numbers instead of the parish of three volumes: Disguise it as the authors pleased (and they showed ingenuity in doing so) it was always the same tale they must relate: the tale of a poor girl ultimately married to a peer of the realm or (at the worst) a baronet. The circumstance is not common in life; but how familiar to the musings of the barmaid! The tales were not true to what men see; they were true to what the readers dreamed.

Let us try to remember how fancy works in children; with what selective partiality it reads, leaving often the bulk of the book unrealized, but fixing on the rest and living it; and what a

passionate impotence it shows-what power of adoption, what weakness to create. It seems to be not much otherwise with uneducated readers. They long, not to enter into the lives of others, but to behold themselves in changed situations, ardently but impotently preconceived. The imagination (save the mark!) of the popular author here comes to the rescue, supplies some body of circumstance to these phantom aspirations, and conducts the readers where they will. Where they will: that is the point; elsewhere they will not follow. When I was a child, if I came on a book in which the characters wore armor, it fell from my hand; I had no criterion of merit, simply that one decisive taste, that my fancy refused to linger in the middle ages. And the mind of the uneducated reader is mailed with similar restrictions. So it is that we must account for a thing otherwise unaccountable; the popularity of some of these great ones of the dust. In defect of any other gift, they have instinctive sympathy with the popular mind. They can thus supply to the shop-girl and the shoe-black vesture cut to the pattern of their naked fancies, and furnish them with welcome scenery and properties for autobiographical romancing.

Even in readers of an upper class, we may perceive the traces of a similar hesitation; even for them, a writer may be too exotic. The villain, even the heroine, may be a Feejee islander, but only on condition the hero is one of ourselves. It is pretty to see the thing reversed in the Arabian tale (Torrens or Burtonthe tale is omitted in popular editions) where the Moslem hero carries off the Christian amazon; and in the exogamous romance, there lies interred a good deal of human history and human nature. But the question of exogamy is foreign to the purpose. Enough that we are not readily pleased without a character of our own race and language; so that, when the scene of a romance is laid on any distant soil, we look with eagerness and confidence for the coming of the English traveller. With the readers of the penny-press, the thing goes further. Burning as they are to penetrate into the homes of the peerage,

they must still be conducted there by some character of their own class, into whose person they cheerfully migrate for the time of reading. Hence the poor governesses supplied in the Young Ladies' Journal. Hence these dreary virtuous ouvriers and ouvrières of Xavier de Montépin. He can do nothing with them; and he is far too clever not to be aware of that. When he writes for the Figaro, he discards these venerable puppets and doubtless glories in their absence; but so soon as he must address the great audience of the halfpenny journal, out come the puppets, and are furbished up, and take to drink again, and are once more reclaimed, and once more falsely accused. See them for what they are-Montépin's decoys; without these he could not make his public feel at home in the houses of the fraudulent bankers and the wicked dukes. The reader, it has been said, migrates into such characters for the time of reading; under their name escapes the

narrow prison of the individual career, and sates his avidity for other lives. To what extent he ever emigrates again, and how far the fancied careers react upon the true one, it would fill another paper to debate. But the case of my sailor shows their grave importance. "Tom Holt does not apply to me," thinks our dully-imaginative boy by the harbor-side, "for I am not a sailor. But if I go to sea it will apply completely." And he does go to sea. He lives surrounded by the fact, and does not observe it. He cannot realize, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which crumbles in discrete impressions even as he lives it, and slips between the fingers of his memory like sand. It is not this that he considers in his rare hours of rumination, but that other life, which was all lit up for him by the humble talent of a Hayward-that other life which, God knows, perhaps he still believes that he is leading-the life of Tom Holt.