It was this quality no less than her real critical power, or perhaps even more than that, which made authors so grateful for her reviews of their work. In reference to a newspaper letter in which she had spoken of Wilkie Collins, the novelist wrote to her: _Mr. Collins to Mrs. Moulton_ "90 GLOUCESTER PLACE, PORTMAN SQUARE, W. March 30, 1880. "I have read your kind letter with much pleasure. I know the 'general reader' by experience as my best friend and ally.... When I return to the charge I shall write with redoubled resolution if I feel that I have the great public with me, as I had then (for example) in the case of 'The New Magdalen.' 'Her Married Life,' in the second part, will be essentially happy. But the husband and wife--the world whose unchristian prejudices and law they set at defiance will slowly undermine their happiness, and will, I fear, make the close of the story a sad one." The letter referred to was one of a long series which Mrs. Moulton contributed to the _New York Independent_. Many of these papers were of marked literary value. A typical one was upon Mme. Desbordes-Valmore, founded upon Sainte Beuve's memoir of that interesting and unhappy French poet. Mrs. Moulton characterizes Mme. Desbordes-Valmore as "the sad, sweet nightingale among the singers of France, and as a tender, elegiac poet" without equal. She closes with these words: "Mme. Valmore passed away in July of 1859. 'We shall not die,' she had said. In that hour a gate was opened to some strange land of light, some new dawning of glory, and the holy saints, to whose fellowship she belonged, received her into the very peace of God." Mrs. Moulton's witty essay on "The Gospel of Good Gowns" was one of this series in _The Independent_, and a fine paper of hers on Thoreau was widely quoted. In a department which for some months she conducted under the title, "Our Society," in a periodical called _Our Continent_, Mrs. Moulton discoursed on manners, morals, and other problems connected with the conduct of life. The incalculable influence of the gentle, refined ideals that she persuasively imaged was a signal factor in the progress of life among the younger readers. Mrs. Moulton's ideal of the importance of manner was that of Tennyson's as expressed in his lines,-- For manners are not idle, but the fruit Of loyal nature and of noble mind. Many of these papers are included in Mrs. Moulton's book called "Ourselves and Our Neighbors," published in 1887. In one of these on "The Gospel of Charm" she says: