delegated to its only fitting province--the amusement of the nursery. "Griffith Gaunt," however, I regard as a falling off, because it is a sour, unpleasant, and therefore inartistic book. "Foul Play" was a clever _tour de force_, a brilliant thing, made to sell, with hardly more character in it than would suffice for a Bowery melodrama. "Put Yourself in his Place" was a wholesome return to the former style, a marrowy, living blue-book, instinct with power and passion. "A Terrible Temptation" I do not admire. I do not think it immoral, but it hardly calls for any deliberate criticism. Since "Hard Cash" Mr. Reade has, in my opinion, written only one novel which the literary world will care to preserve, and even that one, "Put Yourself in his Place," can hardly be said to add one cubit to his stature. Mr. Reade has, I believe, rather a passion for dramatic enterprise, and a characteristic faith in his power to turn out a good drama. A season or two back he hired, I am told, a London theatre, in order to have the complete superintendence of the production of one of his novels turned into a drama. I have been assured that the dramatic version was accomplished entirely by himself. If so, I am sure no enemy could have more cruelly damaged the original work. All the character was completely sponged out of it. The one really effective and original personage in the novel did not appear in the play. A number of the most antique and conventional melodramatic situations and surprises were crammed into the piece. All the silly old stage business about mysterious conspiracies carried on under the very ear of the identical personage who never ought to have been allowed to hear them are called in to form an essential feature of the drama. The play, of course, was not successful, although the novel had in it naturally all the elements of a stirring and powerful drama. If Charles Reade really with his own hand converted a vigorous and thrilling story into that limp, languid, and vapid play, it was surely the most awful warning against amateur dramatic enterprise that ever self-conceit could receive undismayed.