eep grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwholesome
utterances. Of these are many of the long and short stories setting forth
in melodramatic pictures exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children;
or exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet and refined
Magdalens; minute and prolonged dissections of the processes of spiritual
growth; equally minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exercises
of all sorts,--"manuals of drill," so to speak, or "field tactics" for
souls. Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almost
indistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention and
the finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless,
shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, true
enthusiasm and wise precepts.

Where may be the remedy for this widespread and widely spreading disease
among writers we do not know. It is not easy to keep up courageous faith
that there is any remedy. Still Nature abhors noise and haste, and shams
of all sorts. Quiet and patience are the great secrets of her force,
whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion. We must believe
that sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall have
its dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic,
spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it is
silly. But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extreme
contagiousness. All physicians know what a disastrous effect one
hysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. We
remember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of a
woman who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough. Her
lungs, bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition; but she coughed
almost incessantly, especially on the approach of the hour for the
doctor's visit to the ward. In less than one week half the women in the
ward had similar coughs. A single--though it must be confessed rather
terrific--application of cold water to the original offender worked a
simultaneous cure upon her and all of her imitators.

Not long ago a very parallel thing was to be observed in the field of
story-writing. A clever, though morbid and melodramatic writer published a
novel, whose heroine, having once been an inmate of a house of ill-fame,
escaped, and, finding shelter and Christian training in the home of a
benevolent woman, became a model of womanly