I should hardly like to confess how many coins of the realm I dissipated before learning the melancholy truth, that the seductive titles and cuts which form the _tours de force_ of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to the tales themselves, which are like vials of skimmed milk, labeled absinthe, but warranted to be wholly without flavor. Mr. James Payn, who has written very amusingly about the mysterious weekly journals which lie “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa” upon the counters of small, dark shops, “in the company of cheap tobacco, hardbake, and, at the proper season, valentines,” laments with frank asperity that he can find in them neither dramatic interest, nor even impropriety. He has searched them patiently for something wrong, and his quest has been wholly unrewarded. Mr. Thomas Wright, in a paper published some years ago in the “Nineteenth Century,” makes a similar complaint. The lovely heroines of these stories are “virtuous even to insipidity,” and their heroes are so blamably blameless as to be absolutely revolting. Yet it has been my fate to encounter some very pretty villains in the course of my penny readings, and at least one specimen of the sinful gilded youth, who has “handsome blonde hair parted in the middle, a discontented mustache, a pale face and apathetic expression.” This scion of the aristocracy, I am grieved to say, keeps beautiful Jewesses on board his sumptuous yacht, and otherwise misbehaves himself after a fashion calculated to make his relatives and well-wishers more discontented even than his mustache. He has a lovely sister, Alma, with whom, we are assured, the Prince of Wales danced three times in one night, “and was also heard to express his admiration of her looks and her _esprit_ in some very emphatic superlatives, exciting a variety of comment and criticism.” Naturally, and all the more naturally because the fair Alma discreetly reserves her _esprit_ for royal ears and royal commendation, and is exceedingly chary of revealing any of it to interested readers, who are fain to know what kind of conversation the Prince found so diverting. From the specimens presented to our consideration, we are forced to conclude either that his Highness is easily satisfied in the matter of _esprit_, or that he has an almost superhuman power of detecting it when hidden from ordinary observation.