The task of providing literature for the Unknown Public is not the easy thing it seems to critics like Mr. Wright and Mr. Salmon. The Unknown Public has its literature already,--a literature which enjoys an enormous circulation, and gives absolute satisfaction. One publishing company alone, “for the people,” claims that its penny novelettes, issued weekly, reach seven millions of readers, and these seven millions are evidently content with what they receive. Mr. Andrew Lang is responsible for the statement that a story about a mill girl, which was printed in a Glasgow penny journal, so delighted the subscribers that they demanded it should be several times repeated in its columns. “There could not,” says Mr. Lang somewhat wistfully, “be a more perfect and gratifying success;” and publishers of ambitious and high-toned periodicals may well be forgiven for envying such a master-stroke. When were they ever asked to reprint a story, however vaunted its perfections, however popular it seemed to be? The heroine of this magic tale is defrauded of her inheritance by villains who possess sumptuous subterranean palaces and torture-chambers in “her own romantic town” of Glasgow, the last place in the world where we should reasonably expect to find them. “The one essential feature,” Mr. Lang observes, “in a truly successful tale is that there should be an _ingénue_, as pure as poor, who is debarred by conspiracies from the enjoyment of a prodigious fortune.” This is a favorite device with weekly papers at home, and the serial story, on either side of the Atlantic, is perforce a little more stirring in its character than that presented to us in finished form through the medium of the penny novelette. With the first, the “strong situation” is serviceable as a decoy to lure the reader into purchasing the following number. With the second, no such artifice is needed or employed. The buyer has his pennyworth already in hand; and a very good pennyworth it is, judged by quantity alone. Wilkie Collins tells us how he tried vainly to extract from a shopman an opinion as to which was the best journal to select, and how the shopman persisted, very naturally, in saying that there was no choice,--one was every bit as long as another. “Well, you see some likes one, and some the next. Take ’em all the year around, and there ain’t a pin, as I knows of, to choose between them. There’s just about as much in one as there is in its neighbor. All good penn’orths. Bless my soul! Just take ’em up and look for yourself! All good penn’orths, choose where you like.”