ither are gone those stories
that a few years ago could not be printed fast enough--"The
Lamplighter," "Hot Corn," and the rest of that brood? They are hidden
under dust in the alcoves, or have been carted off to the pulp mill.
Could mind of man have fancied, an oblivion so swift for those
favorites of the public? Could mortal ken have foretold its present
fate for the "Wide, Wide World"?--a story now quite dropped out of
sight, but once the town's rage, and whose heroine I remember as a sort
of inexhaustible human watering cart with the tear tap always turned
on.

What has become, too, of those learned novels, patterned after
Bulwer--extracts from Lempriere in dialogue form, sandwiched with
layers of low life? "Surely, my dear niece, you remember what Athenaeaus
quotes on this subject from the Leontium of Hermesianax of Colophon,
the friend of Philetas?" "Perfectly, aunt, and methinks mention is also
made of the same elegiac poem in Pausanias, and again in Antoninus
Liberalis, the latter saying," etc. Where, I say, are the novels in
that vein, with their charming mixture of murder, mythology, and
metaphysics? They have their run, strut their brief hour, and give way
to some "Madcap Violet" or "Helen's Babies." Never fear a lack of fresh
novels. If the lads lose Mayne Reid, they find Jules Verne. The secret
is an open one: the novel is the best paid branch of literature--always
excepting Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Times have changed since "Evelina"
was sold for L20.

Perhaps of all novelists Victor Hugo receives the largest earnings for
a single work. One of his clerical enemies, Mgr. de Segur, has bitterly
attacked him for his gains--"$100,000 for 'Les Miserables' alone," said
the critic in angry extravagance. But Hugo's admirers will not grudge
his gains.

The English have put a premium on prolix novels by giving them a
regulation length of just three volumes, to be cold for a guinea and a
half. This droll uniformity has much less basis of reason than the old
custom of writing tragedies and comedies just five acts long; for there
is sense in making a play last out an evening. Trouble to writer and
weariness to reader must come of spinning a novel against space,
overlaying a plot with trivial incidents, and stuffing a story with
padding, merely to reach a standard of length both arbitrary and
absurd. Yet prodigious was the patience of our novel-reading ancestry
prior to Fielding. The "Grand Cyrus" was issued in ten