and form a hasty judgment, much like that of Mr. Thorpe in Northanger Abbey speaking of Camilla: "I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed, I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it."

The good to be got from reading a book, a good that cannot be obtained by rapid reading, is not the facts that it gives but "the resonance which it awakens in our minds."

Novels, with scarcely any exception, reflect society in some way or other, and thus form an excellent historical guide to the social life of the day in which they are written. We should therefore always consult them when we are studying the social history of any period. Even the minor novelists have much to tell us of the way in which people lived and what they thought. Now there is hardly a single novelist writing betwen 1820 and 1840 who does not in some measure reflect the new ideas of his times. Some, like Godwin and Ward, directly attacked the existing conditions in their

romances.

Fiction then, as now, was more read, and the output was larger than that of any other class of book. Jane Austen says that "the person, be it a gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid."

Of the men who were writing, many who were then popular are now buried in oblivion. The works of these are perhaps more interesting to call to mind than those who have more or less survived the test of time, because though now forgotten they were read as much as the more celebrated. Lord Lytton, writing to Lady Blessington, mentions Leitch Ritchie's Magician as being full of wild and vigorous power, and yet you will not find his name mentioned in Smith's Student's English Literature nor in Chamber's Encyclopædia. Sydney

Smith presses on the attention of his friend Francis Jeffrey the novels of Thomas Henry Lister, and, writing in 1826, asures him that Granby is a novel of great merit.

It would be easy to give other instances of this kind, but a catalogue of these now unknown novels would become wearisome. Of the betterknown novelists who were popular and to whom allusion is constantly made, Ward, Cooper, Hook, Warren and others occur to our minds; they are so well known that the mere mention of their names is enough; but I rather doubt whether the present generation reads many of them. The novels suited their time, and dealt with men and matters in which the public were interested. The reader had begun to make his tastes known; the author who wanted to make money could no longer ignore him and write simply for the love of writing. We see indications of this change creeping in upon Lady Blessington. When sending two of her novels to W. S. Landor she apologizes for them:

I fear they will not interest you, for they are written on the everyday business of life. I wrote because I wanted money; and was obliged to select subjects that would command it for my publisher. None but ephemeral ones will now catch the attention of the readers.

Others who flourished. a few decades earlier still continued to be favorites, and the heroes and heroines in the novels of the day delight in Scott, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Mrs. Inchbald. Catherine, in Northanger Abbey, had read all Mrs. Radcliffe's, and was so fascinated with the Mysteries of Udolpho that when she had once begun it "she could not lay it down again, but finished it in two days, her hair standing on end the whole time."

In real life we surprise Miss Mitford, then a woman of thirty, saunter

ing through the fields and whiling hours away with her "haycock compaion," Mrs. Bennet's Beggar Girl, a five-volume novel, absorbed by its invention and romance. "It is one of the best I have ever met with," she writes to an intimate friend.

The women who wrote in the early part of the nineteenth century enjoyed a popularity as great as the women writers of to-day, and do not seem to have been less numerous. Mrs. Meeke, who died in 1816, was one of Macaulay's favorite writers of fiction. Harriet and Sophia Lee, two sisters, who, in spite of the duties involved in keeping a girls' school, found time to write novels and plays, continued long after their death (in 1824 and 1851 respectively) to please the reader, and Anne Marsh Caldwell maintained for twentysix years-from 1834 to 1860-the position of one of our most admired novelists. Her husband, who was a bank director, became bankrupt, and she then gained a livelihood by her pen.

Jane Porter, who is probably better known, wrote Thaddeus of Warsaw, which went through fourteen editions, and Scottish Chiefs, twelve editions. The former was translated into German and attracted the attention of the King of Würtemberg, and obtained honors for the author. We must also not omit the important names of Mrs. Gore and Frances Trollope. The former, whose novels were sarcastic and violent tirades against fashionable society, was then in the height of her glory, that is, in 1840. From a letter to a friend we see what position she had taken among novelists: "You are very kind to like my new book. Till you praised it, I was in despair. It sells," though she adds, "I was convinced of its utter worthlessness."

Poetry was in much the same plight as prose. The minor poets who aroused enthusiasm were gone and their poems with them. Have you

read Zophiël, by Mrs. Brooks? Why, the London Library only purchased a copy a few weeks ago, and yet one of the greatest critics of the day, Southey, said of her: "I do not know any poet whose diction is naturally so good as Mrs. Brooks's," and of her poem he adds: "I have never seen a more passionate work, rarely one so imaginative and original. There is a song in the last canto, which in its kind is as good as Sappho's famous ode has been thought to be." And Mrs. Hemans has almost passed out of our memory. The few who hold her dear, picture her as a lovable old lady, sitting at her desk or leaning back in her armchair composing hymns and mediocre verses. But those who lived when she wrote talked of her as "a child of song -a complete mistress of the lyre," who possessed the key to their hearts, and were convinced that it would require another age to give birth to another Felicia Hemans.

As for Robert Montgomery, little short of eighty or ninety thousand (see Wm. Jerdan's Autobiography, vol. 4, p. 312, 1853) volumes of his verse were circulated throughout England in various forms; but no one would read him now, though everyone will remember Macaulay's scathing criticism.

There were also then, as now, poets who command a few ardent admirers, of whom Henry Taylor, the author of Philip van Artevelde, was one. His sale was small, and his circle of readers equally limited. Wordsworth even had not yet made his way to favor, and was only popular with a select few.

In this rapid survey of what the people of England were reading, it is impossible to pass over without mention the great group of books dealing with geography and travel. A mere glance at the English Catalogue for 1814-41 would convince anyone of this fact. England's empire had become

colonial and world-wide, and the desire to know, if only from books, something of the countries which formed part of the whole was legitimate and natural. Strange to say, in the fiction of the thirties, I have not come across either a hero or a heroine interrupted in the library over a book of travel, but nevertheless the biographies and memoirs of the time are a striking testimony to the amount of this kind of literature which was read. Sydney Smith's letters are a veritable guide to the descriptive literature which the publishers sent out. He advises Lord Grey to read Bradling's Travels in America, Golovnin's Narrative of My Captivity in Japan, Lady Grey to read Eothen and Basil Hall's Travels. W. S. Landor commends Beckford's Travels to Lady Blessington. There is a general keenness to buy and possess the latest narrative of the lands beyond the seas. Theology, too, has never lacked readers. Revolutions have Rever seemed much to interfere with those who are devoted to this study. I find in a letter of J. Jebb to A. Knox, dated 1831, the following passage in proof of this: "Even in these times which seem to prohibit everything but revolutionary politics, the sale of my Practical Theology and of Dr. Townson's books is quite to the publisher's satisfaction. Townson's works, which have been sold for six shillings a copy, have, in consequence, reached more than their original price, and are nearly out of print."

Sydney Smith is found consoling himself with Doddridge's Exposition, to say nothing of a widely read book, The Dissenter Tripped Up.

was an intelligent woman and an omnivorous reader. She belonged to the middle classes, and we may take her as a typical example of the more intelligent reading public of this period. The books she read were the books to which her class had access, and, as far as she was able, she kept up with the literature published in her day. Her reading was desultory, which she considered more profitable because it gave her a wider general education. She "followed reading," she says, "for its own sake as a pursuit and gratification without any definite object," and made lists of books she wanted to read. She was not always successful in obtaining those of which she had taken a note. Her tastes were varied; she seems to have had a peculiar fondness for reading trials. "I have a passion for trials," she writes to a friend. In her letters she tells her correspondents what she thinks good or bad; what she enjoys and what to her is of doubtful merit. In one letter she grows enthusiastic over Mills's History of the Crusades, and falls in love with Saladin; and in another she gives long lists of "respectable new books" which she has been reading, such as Ware's Palmyra, Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's Log, Hazlitt's View of the Stage, Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, Forsythe's Italy, Dr. Clarke's Travels, and adds a word of praise or blame.

Then again she gets quite "sick of new books," and takes to reading old ones: Milton's Prose Works, Bolingbroke's Political Works, Shakespeare and such like. Anyone pursuing this subject further would find a mine of material in Miss Mitford's correspond

ence. The of beginnings other great changes in the choice of books which were read and studied may be traced to this new era. Philosophy has always had its serious devotees, but they have been few in number. The study

of ancient and medieval metaphysics is one of the most notable features in the present-day revival; in 1830 these branches did not occupy men's minds in any considerable degree. With regard to the great literature of the past the contrast seems even more striking. With the exception of a few of the better-known poets, the large mass of pre-Elizabethan and Elizabethan authors were more or less left unread. Nowadays every minor poet or prosewriter is reprinted, and, even if not read by the general public, some gem, perhaps the only gem, is quoted, or inserted in an anthology, and his name at least becomes known. Some attain a position, merely temporary perhaps, which they never held before in English literature.

Readers in bygone ages were counted by tens; they loved the books they read, and handled them with reverence and care. They seem now to have deteriorated, and scarcely to love books in the same way as their ancestors loved them; too often they handle them as bricks and buy them as furniture; they even mutilate them. Through all changes book-lovers have always remained lovers of books, though some of them in our day have degenerated into bibliomaniacs. Librarians in past centuries in the palaces of the Burgundian dukes were the keepers of jewels and ornaments of gold, and the books they guarded were among their most precious possessions. For a time librarians descended from keepers of gold and silver to the rank of footmen and butlers, and it is only in these latter days that they have begun to take their proper place in the greatest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of letters.

The outward and visible signs of the expansion and progress in trade, and of literary and political development, are first and foremost the libraries.

Disraeli, writing as one of those who
The Nineteenth Century and After.

condemn the movements of their own day, was inclined, in Vivian Grey (1826), to regard libraries as fungus productions of an artificial society. Accord

ing to him a fall of stocks was the thing which affected

the literature of the present day-the mere creature of our imaginary wealth. Everybody being very rich, has afforded to be very literary-books being considered a luxury, almost as elegant and necessary as ottomans, bonbons, and pier-glasses. Consols at 100 were the origin of all book societies.

Consols at 100, however, have done a great deal for the libraries and literary institutions of England, and so for society in general.

Historians and autobiographers are as a rule more or less apt to be pessimistic about their own century and their own generation, and are full of regret for the things which have passed away. Who can read of the French salons, of Holland House, of those literary coteries about which the memoirs of the early nineteenth century tell so much, of those hours of easy, peaceful reading at home in which men and women delighted, without some pang that these things no longer exist?

But the compensations are probably much greater than we imagine. Knowledge is now within the reach of everyone, and thousands to-day find pleasure in books and reading, advantages which they would formerly have disregarded. The book-lover now lives hidden in inaccessible corners, and those who enjoy what is good in literature read undisturbed and unknown in unsuspected places. The country abounds in literary societies, which, while not perhaps of the same high order as the small circles of former days, are doing much useful work. We are in the midst of change both in the literary and in the political world, and the remodelling of society has only just begun.

C. Hagberg Wright.

III.

When Mr. Alan Rutherfurd presented himself the next morning to inquire for his lady of the Blue Glen and the Diridh, he was received somewhat grimly by her great-aunt. She looked extraordinarily formidable in her high, white mutch, decorated with tartan ribbons, and her small sparkling eyes regarded him with a peculiarly shrewish expression.

"Well, Mr. Rutherfurd," said she, "you have come, I suppose, to speir after my grand-niece."

Mr. Rutherfurd confessed it. "I trust she is none the worse of her journey in so rough a vehicle," said he. "Hum," said the old lady drily, "I think she would be very willing to take another to-day to escape her present company. Perhaps you would be willing to take her back where you found her, Mr. Alan?"

"I

Alan repressed his indignation. think, Miss M'Pherson," said he, "that a grand-niece of your own would not be likely to consent to that proposal."

"A grand-niece of my own," retorted the old lady, "should have had more spunk than to run away. It is the most daft-like affair I ever heard of -Sir Ronald's daughter to make off on shank's mare and to come galivanting across the Diridh with a poetical gentleman in a farmer's cart because another gentleman was speiring after her! And what are you to say to Invereil, Mr. Rutherfurd? Is it to be a duel?"

"I think you are under a misapprehension, Miss M'Pherson," said Alan stiffly. "I am not in Miss Elizabeth's confidence, and the slight service I rendered her yesterday was one that any man would have been honored The old lady cut him short. "Dear! dear!" said she mockingly.

"Is this the way of it? I thought it was a rival to Invereil I had here, but it seems I was mistaken. Not even an acquaintance, did you say?"

Alan controlled himself with difficulty-he was hot with indignation for Elizabeth.

"Madam," said he, "if I had the acquaintance that would warrant it I would ask her to-day to be my wife. At least I could protect her from-" He paused to choose his words.

"From her relations, no doubt," put in Miss Rachel maliciously.

Alan bowed ceremoniously. "I did not intend to be so plain," said he. "Miss Rachel, you know me and my prospects as my father's son. Will you permit me to make the further acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth?"

For a moment it was evident that the old lady was taken aback.

"It seems, Alan Rutherfurd, we have gone from jest to earnest," she said. She was silent for a moment. "Hum," she went on, "you have courage for two, and I don't deny you're a better match than Invereil. I will think upon it, Mr. Rutherfurd."

And with that Alan took his leave. The next day, however, found him again at Miss M'Pherson's door. In the interval he had not been idle. He had taken up his abode at the nearest inn, and had made arrangements to fish for trout in the waters of the neighborhood. He had, moreover, sent a man across the Diridh with Mr. M'Tavish's horse and cart, and given that worthy orders to bring back with him such of his personal belongings as had been left behind in the Blue Glen. And now he came upon his wooing with all the ardor of a poet.

Miss Rachel greeted him this time with a grim geniality. "So here you are again, Mr. Rutherfurd!" said she.