It is significant that the magazines of the period had very little use for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, _Harper's Magazine_ alone published no fewer than ten long serials by English novelists: _Denis Duval_ by Thackeray; _The Small House at Allington_ by Trollope; _Our Mutual Friend_ by Dickens; _The Unkind Word_, _Woman's Kingdom_, and _A Brave Lady_ by Dinah Mulock Craik; _Armadale_ by Wilkie Collins; _My Enemy's Daughter_ by Justin M'Carthy; _Anteros_ by the Author of _Guy Livingstone_ [G. A. Lawrence]; and _Anne Furness_ by the Author of _Mabel's Progress_ [Mrs. T. A. Trollope]. Even the _Atlantic Monthly_ left its New England group of producers to publish Charles Reade's _Griffith Gaunt_ in twelve instalments. In 1871 _Scribner's Monthly_ began the prospectus of its second volume with this announcement: Our contributors are among the best who write in the English language. George MacDonald--"the best of living story-writers"--will continue his beautiful story, entitled _Wilfred Cumbermede_, throughout the volume. We have the refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's stories at the hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Scudder. We have engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain--not even excepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially for us an exquisitely characteristic story, etc. The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. Charles Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874: "There is not much in the magazine [_Atlantic_] that is likely to be read twice save by its writers, and this is what the great public likes. There must be a revival of letters in America, if literature as an art is not to become extinct. You should hear Godkin express himself in private on this topic."[37] No wonder that the book-reviewer of _Harper's Magazine_ for May, 1870, with nothing better before him than _Miss Van Kortland_, Anonymous; _Hedged In_, by Miss Phelps; and _Askaros Kassis_, by DeLeon, should have begun his review, "We are so weary of depending on England, France, and Germany for fiction, and so hungry for some genuine American romance, that we are not inclined to read very critically the three characteristic American novels which lie on our table." No wonder that when Harte's _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ in the _Overland Monthly_ was read in the _Atlantic_ office, Fields sent by return mail a request "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it, and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of California literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[38] The new American fiction began with Bret Harte. I