you. It was because I discerned in you that power which coerces
men. It was because I believed in the future; it was because I
trusted you. Yes, it was for that, and yet this afternoon--"

The advance made in this brilliant book, for such it is with all its
faults, from that grotesquely immoral work called _The Truth about
Tristrem Varick_, justifies our expressed faith in the ability of Edgar
Saltus. This novel is clearly highly dramatic and intensely interesting.
There is the making of a foremost master of fiction in the young man
when he shall have shaken off his affectations.

_His Way and Her Will_, by Fannie Aymar Mathews (Belford, Clarke &
Co.).--This is a vivid picture of our supposed New York social life, as
seen by certain writers of fiction through the plate-glass window of a
fashionable _modiste_ in an atmosphere heavy with the cheap scents of a
barber-shop. We are introduced to most elegant people of high birth and
culture through many generations. The villain is a villain because he is
the son of a lowborn and base stonemason.

We have two sorts of fiction affected mainly by our American novelists.
One is of the English sort, not Braddon, but Trollope and Miss Austen,
where the interest, of a mild sort, turns on the social law of caste.
"The hero and the heroine paddle about in the shallow sea of affection,
never out of sight of the church-steeple," and it is a poor plebeian
girl beloved by a lord, or a noble lady, rich and well-born, who is
sought for by a lover of base origin. The other, or French method, is to
have the characters tossed upon an awful ocean of passion, where the rag
of chastity is torn in shreds by the lurid storm.

The novel before us is of the English class. As we have no aristocracy,
one is created. It is, of course, one of birth. The old Knickerbockers
and the Puritans of the Mayflower furnish the lofty pedigree, and
chivalrous gentlemen and silken dames appear in or come out of elegant
drawing-rooms, and love and make love in a most refined and lofty sort.

The stories are not only imaginary, but the foundations for the same are
of the stuff dreams are made of. There is no such social life in this
land of ours. The aristocracy we have here is one of wealth, and of
necessity is without culture. Money-getting, in its best aspect, is a
mere instinct. As we have to get our living from the hard crust of earth
on which we are born, nature has given us the instincts nec