the luxuriance
of its growth has since become tropical. His observations are drawn from
some half a dozen specimens of it only, whereas I now hold in my
hand--or rather in both hands--nearly half a hundred of them. The
population of readers must be dense indeed in more than one sense that
can support such a crop.

Doubtless the individual circulation of none of these serials is equal
to that of the most successful of them at the date of their first
discovery; but those who read them must, from various causes, of which
the most obvious is the least important, have trebled in number.
Population, that is to say, has increased in very small proportion as
compared with the increase of those who very literally run and read--the
peripatetic students, who study on their way to work or even as they
work, including, I am sorry to say, the telegraph boy on his errand.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding its gigantic dimensions, the Unknown
Public remains practically as unknown as ever. The literary wares that
find such favour with it do not meet the eye of the ordinary observer.
They are to be found neither at the bookseller's nor on the railway
stall. But in back streets, in small dark shops, in the company of cheap
tobacco, hardbake (and, at the proper season, valentines), their leaves
lie thick as those in Vallombrosa. Early in the week is their
springtime, when they are put forth from Heaven knows what
printing-houses in courts and alleys, to lie for a few days only on the
counter in huge piles. On Saturdays, albeit that is their nominal
publishing day, they have for the most part disappeared. For this sort
of literature has one decidedly advanced feature, and possesses one
virtue of endurance--it comes out ever so long before the date it bears
upon its title-page, and 'when the world shall have passed away' will,
by a few days at least, if faith is to be placed in figures, survive it.

Why it should have any date at all no man can tell. There is nothing in
the contents that is peculiar to one year--or, to say truth, of one
era--rather than another. As a rule, indeed, time and space are alike
annihilated in them, in order to make two lovers happy. The general
terms in which they are written is one of their peculiar features. One
would think that, instead of being as unlike real life as stories
professing to deal with it can be, they were photographs of it, and that
the writers, as in the following instance, had always the fear of