tuff and a
good book which is "the Precious life-blood of a Master Spirit." The
bookman will of course upon occasion trifle with various kinds of
reading, and there is one member of the brotherhood who has a devouring
thirst for detective stories, and has always been very grateful to the
creator of _Sherlock Holmes_. It is the merest pedantry for a man to
defend himself with a shamed face for his light reading: it is enough
that he should be able to distinguish between the books which come and go
and those which remain. So far as I remember, _The Mystery of a Hansom
Cab_ and _John Inglesant_ came out somewhat about the same time, and
there were those of us who read them both; but while we thought the
_Hansom Cab_ a very ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium
of a railway journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves.
Certainly it is not lying between _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ and
_The Mayor of Casterbridge_. But some of us venture to think that in
that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot through
both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the seventeenth
century, Mr. Shorthouse won a certain place in English literature.

When people are raving between the soup and fish about some popular novel
which to-morrow will be forgotten, but which doubtless, like the moths
which make beautiful the summer-time, has its purpose in the world of
speech, it gives one bookman whom I know the keenest pleasure to ask his
fair companion whether she has read _Mark Rutherford_. He is proudly
conscious at the time that he is a witness to perfection in a gay world
which is content with excitement, and he would be more than human if he
had not in him a touch of the literary Pharisee. She has _not_ read
_Mark Rutherford_, and he does not advise her to seek it at the
circulating library, because it will not be there, and if she got it she
would never read more than ten pages. Twenty thousand people will
greedily read _Twice Murdered and Once Hung_ and no doubt they have their
reward, while only twenty people read _Mark Rutherford_; but then the
multitude do not return to _Twice Murdered_, while the twenty turn again
and again to _Mark Rutherford_ for its strong thinking and its pure
sinewy English style. And the children of the twenty thousand will not
know _Twice Murdered_, but the children of the twenty, with others added
to them, will know and love _Mark Rutherford_. M