"Sisty," said Blanche, with an appalling solemnity on her face, "do you know what I've been thinking?" "Not I, miss--what?--something very deep, I can see--very horrible, indeed, I fear, you look so serious." "Why, I've been thinking," continued Blanche, not relaxing a muscle, and without the least bit of a blush--"I've been thinking that I'll be your little wife; and then, of course, we shall all live together." Blanche did not blush, but I did. "Ask me that ten years hence, if you dare, you impudent little thing; and now, run away to Mrs Primmins, and tell her to keep you out of mischief, for I must say good-morning." But Blanche did not run away, and her dignity seemed exceedingly hurt at my mode of taking her alarming proposition, for she retired into a corner pouting, and sate down with great majesty. So there I left her, and went my way to Vivian. He was out; but, seeing books on his table, and having nothing to do, I resolved to wait for his return. I had enough of my father in me to turn at once to the books for company; and, by the side of some graver works which I had recommended, I found certain novels in French, that Vivian had got from a circulating library. I had a curiosity to read these--for, except the old classic novels of France, this mighty branch of its popular literature was then new to me. I soon got interested, but what an interest!--the interest that a nightmare might excite, if one caught it out of one's sleep, and set to work to examine it. By the side of what dazzling shrewdness, what deep knowledge of those holes and corners in the human system, of which Goethe must have spoken when he said somewhere--(if I recollect right, and don't misquote him, which I'll not answer for)--"There is something in every man's heart which, if we could know, would make us hate him,"--by the side of all this, and of much more that showed prodigious boldness and energy of intellect, what strange exaggeration--what mock nobility of sentiment--what inconceivable perversion of reasoning--what damnable demoralisation! I hate the cant of charging works of fiction with the accusation--often unjust and shallow--that they interest us in vice, or palliate crime, because the author truly shows what virtues may entangle themselves with vices; or commands our compassion, and awes our pride, by teaching us how men deceive and bewitch themselves into guilt. Such painting belongs to the dark truth of all tragedy, from Sophocles to Shakspeare. No; this is not what shocked me in those books--it was not the interesting me in vice, for I felt no interest in it at all; it was the insisting that vice is something uncommonly noble--it was the portrait of some coldblooded adultress, whom the author or authoress chooses to call _pauvre Ange!_ (poor angel!);--it was some scoundrel who dupes, cheats, and murders under cover of a duel, in which he is a second St George; who does not instruct us by showing