“I don’t want one of your ‘strong’ books,” said a customer at one of the circulating libraries the other day. “Give me something I can read to my wife without being ashamed.” This puts the case in a nutshell. No clean-minded man can read the modern “strong” book praised by the Ishbosheth and feel quite safe, or even quite manly in his wife’s presence. He will find himself before he knows it mumbling something about the gross and fleshly temptations of a deformed gentleman with short legs; or he will grow hot-faced and awkward over the narrative of a betrayed milkmaid who enters into all the precise details of her wrongs with a more than pernicious gusto. It is true that he will probably chance upon no worse or more revolting circumstances of human life than are dished up for the general Improvement of Public Morals in our halfpenny dailies; but he will realize, if he be a man of sense, that whereas the divorce court and police cases in the newspaper are very soon forgotten, the impression of a “strong” book, particularly if the “strong” parts are elaborately and excruciatingly insisted upon, lasts, and sometimes leaves tracks of indelible mischief on minds which, but for its loathsome influence, would have remained upright and innocent. Thought creates action. An idea is the mainspring of an epoch. Therefore the corrupters of thought are responsible for corrupt deeds in an individual or a nation. From a noble thought--from a selfless pure ideal--what great actions spring! Herein should the responsibility of Literature be realized. The Ishbosheth, with their “strong” books, have their criminal part in the visible putrescence of a certain section of society known as the “swagger set.” Perhaps no more forcible illustration of the repulsion exercised by nature itself to spiritual and literary disease could be furnished than by the death of the French “realist” Zola. Capable of fine artistic work, he prostituted his powers to the lowest grade of thought. From the dust-hole of the frail world’s ignorance and crime he selected his olla-podrida of dirty scrapings, potato-peelings, candle-ends, rank fat, and cabbage water, and set them all to seethe in the fire of his brain, till they emitted noxious poison, and suffocating vapours calculated to choke the channels of every aspiring mind and idealistic soul. Nature revenged herself upon him by permitting him to be likewise asphyxiated--only in the most prosy and “realistic” manner. It was one of those terribly grim jests which she is fond of playing off on those who blaspheme her sacred altars. A certain literary aspirant hovering on the verge of the circle of the Ishbosheth, complained the other day of a great omission in the biography of one of his dead comrades of the pen. “They should have mentioned,” he said, “that he allowed his body to _swarm with vermin_!” This is true Ishbosheth art. Suppress the fact that the dead man had good in him, that he might have been famous had