It is hardly possible to discuss contemporary literature without speaking of that which is not literature,--the periodicals. One of the conditions of the present time which most strongly affects the relations of ordinary readers to reading in general is the part which periodicals of one sort or another play in modern life. The newspaper enters so intimately into existence to-day that no man can escape it if he would, and with innumerable readers it is practically the sole mental food. It is hardly necessary to say that there is no more relation between the newspaper and literature than there would be between two persons because they both wear hats. Both books and journals are expressed in printed words, and that is about all that there is in common. It is necessary to use the daily paper, but its office is chiefly a mechanical one. It is connected with the purely material side of life. This is not a fault, any more than it is the fault of a spade that it is employed to dig the earth instead of being used to serve food with. It is not the function of the newspapers to minister to the intellect or the imagination in any high sense. They fulfill their mission when they are clean and reliable in material affairs. What is beyond this is a pretense at literature under impossible conditions, assumed to beguile the unwary, and harmless or vicious, according to circumstances. It is seen at its worst in the Sunday editions, with their sheets as many --as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa. It is safe to say that for the faithful reader of the Sunday newspaper there is no intellectual salvation. Like the Prodigal Son, he is fain to fill his belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and he has not the grace even to long for the more dignified diet of fatted calf. The newspaper habit is pretty generally recognized as demoralizing, and in so far it may be in a literary point of view less dangerous than the magazine habit. The latter is often accompanied by a self-righteous conviction that it is a virtue. There is a class who take on airs of being of the intellectual elect on the strength of reading all the leading magazines; who are as proud of having four serials in hand at once as is a society belle of being able to drive as many horses; who look with a sort of pitying contempt upon persons so old-fashioned as to neglect the magazines in favor of books, and who in general are as proudly patronizing in their attitude toward literature as they are innocent of any connection with it. This is worse than too great a fondness for journalism, and of course this is an extreme type; but it is to be feared that at their best the magazines represent mental dissipation.