who inflicted much pain and suffering on the virtuous characters, but was ultimately conquered and subverted. Now, however, the villains form the majority-one angel of innocence, perhaps, is permitted to roam through a pandemonium of fiends-but often enough there is no angel of innocence at all-all the dramatis persona are steeped in meanness and scoundrelism. It is curious that Society should not only permit such a monstrous libel on its own character, but should also complacently reward its libellers. We are depicted as a set of crawling vermin, perpetually engaged in stinging each other, and no one seems offended. If a real village were mentioned by name in a novel, and peopled with such monsters, its inhabitants would go to law with the publishers; but as the libel is only pointed against all England, we suffer it to pass unheeded-indeed, we gloat over its professed revelations.

Novels of this sort must be mischievous, especially to the young and impressionable, who believe all they read. If we should not like our daughters to frequent the company of rakes and Anonymas, swindlers and murderers in real life, we cannot consistently introduce them to such society in fiction. Moreover, the vices which in actual life would appear odious and vulgar, are in these books softened by the qualities attributed to the persons who commit them. The cheat, the gambler and the seducer, is depicted as a handsome manly fellow, and his beauty and his skill in horsemanship are dangled before our eyes as a reason for pardoning his criminalities. The murderer of the old régime had a villanous countenance, the murderer-or rather murderess, for ladies most often break the sixth commandment—of modern fiction is a gentle girlish creature with a peach-bloom complexion, soft blue eyes, and a wealth of golden hair. Miss Braddon is a noted connoisseur of hair, and skilfully leads us to infer that the possession of an abundant and silky chevelure does in some mysterious manner render guilt less guilty.

Let us suppose that some intelligent native of a distant land, unacquainted with the conditions of English morality, should before visiting this country sit down to a diligent study of Miss Braddon's principal writings. In "Lady Audley's Secret," he would learn that a beautiful young woman, having inadvertently married two husbands, tries to free herself from her perplexities by committing two murders; in "Aurora Floyd" he would be introduced to another bigamist, and suspected murderess; in "Eleanor's Victory" he would see a gambler, a cheat, and a will-forger blossoming into a reputable painter; in "John Marchmont's Legacy" the leading villains stop short of mur

der, and only attempt to imprison an innocent girl for life; in "Only a Clod" he would find attempted bigamy, seduction, and delirium tremens; in "Henry Dunbar" a hideous murder, the murderer being also a convicted forger, and his daughter the heroine of the book; in the "Doctor's Wife" he would encounter another convict's daughter, who marries a respectable doctor, tires of him in a week, flirts up to infidelity-point with a rich handsome artist, and is rewarded-when her father has murdered the artist, and her husband has died of typhoid fever-by the bequest of the artist's fortune. In "Birds of Prey," he would be brought into a cage of foul and unclean creatures. There is a veteran card-sharper-there is his charming daughter who hopelessly loves the card-sharper's confederate-there is a rich and respect able poisoner, whose unscrupulous brother is fully aware of his guilt, but withholds his knowledge for the furtherance of his own interests. Six volumes will be needed for the complete exhibition of this phantasmagoria of crime. Assuredly, the sensational studies of our intelligent stranger would cause him to shun England as one of those dark places of the earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.

Fortunately, the mischief of such books as these is somewhat neutralized by the unreality of the characters. They are mere puppets, in whom, apart from their crimes and misdeeds, we can feel but little interest. If we take away the Old Bailey scaffolding, the structure crumbles into a shapeless ruin. Yet we must not underrate Miss Braddon's undoubted powers. She uses her repulsive materials with great skill, she unfolds her narratives clearly, she writes without affectation, she compels our curiosity. This commendation applies to most of her earlier books, but of late we perceive a falling-off in these valuable characteristics. Compared, for instance, with "Aurora Floyd," "Birds of Prey" appears wiredrawn and insipid.

Mrs. Henry Wood is equally prone to the commission of fictional bigamy and murder. Even in a story written to suit the decorous taste of "Good Words," the chief interest turns on a doctor, who is wrongfully suspected of poisoning a patient for the sake of her fortune. But in spite of Mrs. Wood's sins against true art, and against Lindley Murray, and though her pages teem with horrors, there is a wholesomer tone about the books themselves, there is an occasional vein of humour-witness Jan, for example, in "Verner's Pride "-there is an absence of horsiness and Bohemianism, which makes us prefer her to her fair rival.

We now come to a class of female novelists who depict the pecca

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dilloes of fictitious fashionable life rather than its crimes, and who write as a fast young lady resident in a garrison town might be supposed to write while aping the character of a fast young man. Wilkie Collins originated the Old Bailey school, and Mr. Edmund Yates may be regarded as the Principal of the Ladies' Fast-Life Literary Academy. Of this school, Miss Annie Thomas may be selected as a promising pupil. There may not be much Real Life in her books, but it cannot be denied that there is a good deal of "Bell's Life." Authoresses of this type feel an inward conviction that they are really rather ignorant of the actual doings of that mysterious bearded animal called Man; but they believe they cannot be far wrong if they make him smoke, drink, and swear inordinately, and talk unceasing slang. An atmosphere of distrust, moreover, envelopes Miss Thomas's characters. Husbands and wives watch each other furtively when the postman arrives, for there is pretty sure to be some compromising missive in the letter-bag. A low moral tone, we are compelled to say, distinguishes most of Miss Thomas's books; and we wonder, as we read, where an educated lady can have picked up such mean and unworthy conceptions of her fellow-creatures. Can she believe that her novels are genuine pictures of English life? or does she sedulously collect all the disagreeable stories she hears, and weave them together for the sake of gratifying a debased public taste. It is wearisome work to read much about ill-behaved, disreputable people. Even Thackeray was too fond of the seamy side of human nature; and if the great satirist lessened his merits by such descriptions, what shall we say of Miss Thomas, who possesses neither the playful humour nor the keen sarcasm which brighten Thackeray's meanest and most repulsive conceptions ? There is some smartness and cleverness in her books, but we have found them rather unreadable, and we rise from them with a sense of relief that the real world is better than Miss Thomas's world.

The writings of Mrs. Edwards, the authoress of the "Morals of Mayfair," etc., are quite free from the coarse and prosaic materialism of which we have just been complaining, but they are the more mischievous on account of the refinement and ability which they display. In spite of her intellectual superiority, we must class Mrs. Edwards's earlier works with those of the sensational and rapid school. There is the same lack of real nobleness and heroism in her creations. In "Miss Forrester," for example, the heroine, with whose joys and sorrows we are expected to sympathise, begins by deliberately starving

an old lady to death; but Honoria Forrester is a beauty, and we are craftily led to forget her evil-doing in contemplation of her lovely yellow hair. "Steven Lawrence, Yeoman," however, shows a great improvement. It is a very clever story, infinitely superior to the best of Miss Braddon's chronicles of horrors; in fact, not a sensation narrative at all, and, as far as the tale has yet proceeded, though some painful scenes are evidently impending, little objection can be taken to its moral tone.

Mrs. Lynn Linton, another authoress of real talent, deserves notice here. Her writings display some of the moral defects of the modern feminine school, but her faithful pictures of north country life, though they do not atone for these defects, dispose us to treat her with leniency.

There is a comparative originality and earnestness of purpose about the novels of Miss Florence Marryat which stays our critical wrath; but they are not the sort of books which we should like to see written by a woman whom we loved and respected. Take Miss Marryat's last book, "The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt." It is better worth reading than some of the trash to which we have alluded; its pictures are more like pictures of real life; its characters resemble real men and women; still it deals with topics which, if they must be handled at all, we would sooner see handled by men.

And what shall we say of Ouida-the mysterious Ouida, whose nom de plume may denote either gender, but whose writings betray the fair hand of Woman? Ouida's morality is of the loosest; and if we treat her with less severity than she seems to deserve, it is because the incidents of her stories take place in an unreal fantastic fairy land. We never think of Chandos as a modern English gentleman, when we read of his glorious beauty, his brilliant intellect, his oriental indolence. It is the denizen of another planet whom we see lazily opening heaps of pink and green-scented notes between the puffs of his narghileh, or banqueting in old Pagan fashion with a wreath of roses dipped in Burgundy upon his marble brow. Ouida, who may be regarded as the literary god-daughter of Lord Lytton and "Guy Livingstone," really possesses no small amount of poetical power, and force of description. But the morality of her writings is utterly unsound, and might do much harm, were it not that the scenes she depicts are unlike anything under the sun. We laugh at her grandiloquence and her classical allusions, but we gravely lament the laxity of her moral fibre.

Last, youngest, and perhaps most pernicious of all the pupils of the Fast-Life Literary Academy, we must name the authoress of "Cometh Up as a Flower," that book with such a sweet Scriptural title, and—in spite of its perpetual Biblical quotations-such very unscriptural morality. "Cometh Up as a Flower" being a first work, we might have passed it by as an efflorescence of youthful imprudence; but the writer has since seen fit to issue a second book, with a still longer title and a still more objectionable moral tone. Both these novels are devoted to the glorification of love-love of the most burning, sensual type; and in either case the heroine is represented as eager to court eternal damnation for the sake of the briefest possible indulgence of her mad passion. These books are undoubtedly clever, and, we regret to say it, undoubtedly popular; but they cannot be called wholesome reading, for they only serve to stimulate our passions, which are quite strong enough without artificial encouragement. The novels are a strange farrago of Scripture and slang, pathos and petulance, commonplace remarks put in affectedly smart language, bursts of rhetoric and indifferent grammar. It puzzles us to conceive how a well-bred young woman can write such books. Does she evolve these passionate scenes out of her inner consciousness, or has she really had a King Olaf and a Dare Stamer of her own? In the latter case it would have been wiser to leave such reminiscences to the obscurity of her diary.

Fortunately there are still some ladies left to sustain the literary honours of their sex. Miss Amelia B. Edwards and Mrs. Riddell perhaps approach nearest to the sensational school, but they are distinguished from it by their superior ability, and by their power of creating an interest in something nobler than vice or criminality. But even Mrs. Riddell is fond of bigamy; the plot of her best book, "George Geith,” turns upon it. Why are ladies so attracted by bigamy, and why is it always bigamy of the excusable sort? In real life bigamy is usually an aggravated crime, being simply seduction under another name. Mrs. Riddell possesses poetical feeling and dramatic power, but her moral reflections are apt to be tedious. Lady writers who are neither fast nor sensational are much given to sermonizing. There is too much of this sort of padding in the novels of Miss Yonge and Miss Mulock, of whose works we would otherwise speak with unfeigned admiration and respect. George Eliot towers far above all the authoresses we have hitherto mentioned, but her genius is so exceptional, and so different in quality from that of any of her compeers, that we scarcely reckon her as a representative female novelist. For this honourable post we should