Possibly, the sensational style has been found to have lost its force, and a more quiet and stately tone to be more promotive of the popularity of bread-pills and root-bitters. It looks more professional. Mountebankery in physic has been overdone, as it has in a great many other things. The quacks, if they successfully inculcate this lesson and bring in a corresponding reform, will have been useful public servants. Others have been forcing the pace as well as they, and may well slacken speed, if not call a halt. The blatant and dogmatic has been increasingly predominant in the announcement of new theories, notions and "missions." We are all concerned in seeing it checked, and simple truth and plodding inquiry once more given a chance. Repeated disappointments have made the world distrustful of startling discoveries and sweeping panaceas--a fact which should commend itself to the attention of all the charlatans, and of those who, not charlatans, have caught from them the fashion of violent and premature trumpeting. Political and social cure-alls will have to work their way slowly and painfully into notice. They must submit to the rules of trade, and not look for success until they have demonstrated that what they offer in the market is what it pretends to be. The world is tired of being taken by storm. Just now it is in a more than usually distrustful mood--in a state of marked disillusionment. It declines to have a creed of any kind slammed into its face--so many new ones have palpably failed, and so many old ones have proved themselves possessed of forgotten virtues. Good and evil have proved to be omnipresent, and to pervade everything, like iron and sulphur. E. C. B. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Madame Gervaisais. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. New Edition. Paris. This is in many respects a remarkable book. It shows unusual talent and thought--skill in the morbid anatomy of the soul. It is out of the common line in having but one character, the heroine, and not a word about love. It is, in fact, the biography of a woman during her conversion to Roman Catholicism: the incidents are merely the successive steps by which she is brought within the pale. The interest lies in the mental and moral fluctuations through which she passes while under the influence to which she is subjected, and which in one way or another does not cease to act upon her for an instant. The book is a complement to Madame Craven's pictures of conversion and the devout life, but differs from them in the point of view.