It has not been my experience to find in these weeklies--and I have read many of them--even a dim reflection of Ouida’s meretricious glitter. A gentle and unobtrusive dullness; a smooth fluency of style, suggestive of the author’s having written several hundreds of such stories before, and turning them out with no more intellectual effort than an organ-grinder uses in turning the crank of his organ; an air of absolute unreality about the characters, not so much from overdrawing as from their deadly sameness; conversations of vapid sprightliness and an atmosphere of oppressive respectability,--these are the characteristics of penny fiction, if I may judge from the varied specimens that have fallen into my hands. The foreign scoundrels and secret poisoners, the sumptuous wealth and lavish bloodshed, that thrilled the boyhood of Mr. Wright have, I greatly fear, been refined out of existence. There is an occasional promise of this sort of thing, but never any adequate fulfillment. I once hoped much from the opening paragraph of a tale describing the virtuous heroine’s wicked husband in language which seemed to me full of bright auspices for his future:-- “The speaker was a fair, well-dressed man, in appearance about three-and-thirty. A yellow mustache increased the languid, _insouciant_ expression of his long, well-cut features, which were handsome, but, despite their delicacy, had a singular animal resemblance in them,--God’s image in the possession of a cool, unprincipled fiend, which now and then peered out of the pale blue eyes, half veiled by the yellow lashes.” Yet, with all his advantages of physiognomy, the utmost this pale-eyed person achieves is to hang around in his wife’s way until she shoots him,--accidentally, of course,--and secures herself from any further annoyance.