We have

some dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books these are our demands. nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases -the warrior place his men as he likes the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good? when the battle has been fought, Who won ? when the book comes out, Does it read?

Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty to write agreeably some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other man's book.

Literature exists to please, to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and

their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures-and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe. Hear him in The Frank Courtship:

""I must be loved;" said Sybil; "I must see
The man in terrors, who aspires to me :
At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,

What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel:

Nay, such the rapture that my smiles inspire

That reason's self must for a time retire."

"Alas! for good Josiah," said the dame,

"These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust! He cannot, child: ".

the child replied, "He must."

;

Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society's service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.

But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame - for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name be brought upon the reader's quivering lip?

To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's.

WORN-OUT TYPES.

It is now a complaint of quite respectable antiquity that the types in which humanity was originally set up by a humourloving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief Even a Chaucer (so it is nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true bad ones for the most part; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not group well; we only mix. All this, and

it is a plane. said) could make

A cheerfully

more, is alleged against us. disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told,

with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously,' And how would that matter?' the position of things becomes serious, and demands a few minutes' investigation.

As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one-most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows:

'It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from the