ve become familiar with who have ever had a large acquaintance with
young ladies' poems. They all write about death with a pertinacity that
is positively astounding. It is not that the young people actually want
to die. But they like the idea that their family circle will find out,
when it is too late, all the mistakes and injustices it has committed
towards them, and that this world will perceive that it has been
entertaining unawares an angel, just as the angel has taken flight
upwards to another. The juvenile aspirant commences with revenging her
wrongs in heaven, but it occurs to her before long that she can with
equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose,
and hymnology to fiction. The element of self-consciousness, unknown to
herself, still continues to prevail, and to color the character of the
heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves
free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers,
whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an
idealized portrait of themselves.

But the poorer or less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape
from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the
case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without,
but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them
which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or
the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty
years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or
entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are
afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be
always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of
universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they
will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of the glorified
adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most
successful efforts of feminine art.

INTERFERENCE.

About the strongest propensity in human nature, apart from the purely
personal instincts, is the propensity to interfere. Not tyranny, which
is another matter--tyranny being active while interference is negative;
the one standing as the masculine, the other as the feminine, form of
the same principle. Besides, tyranny has generally some personal gain in
view when it takes in hand to force people to do what t