le heart! May love and truth guide such a man always!"

Most of us have known an era in life when we looked down on novels like
Miss Muloch's, with their gentle refrain: "He was so handsome, how
could she help loving him? She was so beautiful, what could he do but
adore her?" Better worth reading were stories of frontier trails,
knightly tourneys, chases of smuggler and corvette--those stimulating
feasts that we swallowed rather too hastily for health, and which, I
grant the St. Louis preacher, formed so rich a mixture that nightmare
sometimes followed a _pate_ of adventure and murder on which we had too
bountifully supped.

Yet who would willingly forget the terror of that moment when Crusoe
discovers the footprints on the lonely shore? I fancy many a lad has
borne testimony to the genius of De Foe by popping his curly pate
beneath the bed clothes at that awful juncture, in as great fright as
if he himself had just seen the track in the sand. Or perhaps, living
by the seaside, he has rowed his wherry to some neighboring bunch of
rocks, to take possession of it, Crusoe fashion, bribing some less
enthusiastic companion to act the role of Friday, until, unworthy of
his faithful prototype, the extemporized Friday sulks and throws off
his allegiance. I lately heard that Crusoe's isle was now tenanted by
industrious German colonists, who had planted and stocked it, not like
Robinson, but under all agricultural advantages, and that Juan
Fernandez was a regular entrepot for whale ships. Think of it! Yankee
tars revictual where the lonely mariner saw cannibals feasting! But it
is only Selkirk's domain that is thus invaded; Crusoe's right there is
none to dispute; safe in the keeping of genius, his monarchy can no
more be annexed by filibuster or colonist than the magic isle of
Prospero.

Musing on popular novels, one is struck by the changes of fashion in
fiction. Who now reads "Clarissa," which Dr. Johnson pronounced the
first book of the world for knowledge of the human heart; which
D'Alembert styled unapproachably greater than any romance ever written
in any language; for which Diderot predicted an immortality as
illustrious as that of Homer? Who reads "Cecilia," which Burke sat up
all night to read? The romances over which our great grandmothers
simpered and sighed are to our age intolerable bores. Reade, not
Richardson, is the man for our money; Miss Braddon, not Miss Burney, is
the rage at the circulating libraries. Wh