frequently read as anything written by the most prominent masculine minds in the land. As a novelist, the young woman is immeasurably the superior of the young man. No young man ever wrote a novel as famous as “Charles Auchester” at as early an age (seventeen years) as that of the young lady who is the author of this still much-read book; and our publishers are flooding the market with other novels by women who have not yet reached their majority. If quick perception, facility of expression, and piquant comment are sufficient to make the novelist, our future novels must be written principally by young women. That they make some dreadful blunders is very true. Some of the most abominable books that have been inflicted upon a much-suffering public during the past year have been from the pens of young women who ought to have known better, if they had known anything at all. Nevertheless, it is a great deal easier in literature to tone down than to tone up, and somehow the necessity for toning down has not been apparent to any great extent in fiction and poetry written by young men. The “restraining force,” to which social philosophers attribute the sudden rise of some family, nation and tribe, may account for the sudden prominence and brilliancy of women in many departments of life. There may be such a thing as inheritance by sex, and a sex long suppressed, as woman certainly has been, in all but the domestic virtues, may have a great deal to give the world and then suddenly fade out of prominence. But at present all odds are in favor of woman. She has made her way so rapidly, though unobtrusively, and so pleasantly, that every man who has the proper manly heart within him will be glad to see her go a great deal further, and believe that she is quite competent to do it. CHAPTER XXIII. OUR LITERATURE. Americans are the greatest readers on earth. Any one can tell you this--any one from a college president down to the newsboy on a railway train. They read pretty much everything, and never are at a loss for ways of obtaining something to read. Books are cheaper here than anywhere else in the world, thanks to immunity from arrest and punishment for theft of literary property. We can take the brains of all Europe, as expressed in printed pages on the other side of the Atlantic, and reprint them here without fear of the sheriff, and what man can do without fear of the law he is likely to do so long as he sees any money in it.