leasure which children find in having a
story told over and over in exactly the same terms. The new reading
public would rebel against any variance, just as children do.

The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at least were silent,
but one of them made the speaker observe that he had not told them what
this innumerable unreasoning multitude had read before the present
plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had infested everybody's
bread-trough.

The philosopher said the actual interior form of non-literary literature
was an effect of the thin spread of our literary culture, and outwardly
was the effect of the thick spread of our material prosperity. The
dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel of yesterday in an
avatar which left its essence unchanged. It was even worse, for it was
less sincerely and forcibly written, and it could not be so quickly worn
out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, and binding gave it a
claim to regard which could not be ignored, and established for it a
sort of right to lie upon the table, and then stand upon the shelf,
where it seemed to relate itself to genuine literature, and to be of the
same race and lineage. As for this vast new reading public, it was the
vast old reading public with more means in its pocket of satisfying its
crude, childish taste. Its head was the same empty head.

There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for a while no one
spoke. Then some one tried in vain to turn the subject, while the
philosopher smiled upon the desolation he had made; and then one of that
sex which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its "sense of
satisfaction ache" through the increase of conviction, asked him why the
English reading public, which must be so much more cultivated than our
new reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile effects in
works of imagination, the stirring incidents, the well-worn plots, the
primitive passions, and the robustious incentives. He owned the fact,
but he contended that the fact, though interesting, was not so
mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be explained that the
English had never taken the imagination very seriously, and that in
their dense, close civilization, packed tight with social, political,
and material interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly excitement
and amusement. They had not turned to it for edification or instruction,
for that thrill of solemn joy whic