For several months the booksellers of the principal cities in this country reported that the book _David Harum_ sold better than any other. The sales went into the hundreds of thousands. It was reviewed with acclamation by all the popular newspapers and magazines, stared at you from every “centre table” and was flung into your ears whenever you had the hardihood to enter a “parlor.” _David Harum_ is one of the most candidly vulgar and stupid books ever proffered to the taste and understanding of “the general reader.” It is of course largely written in “dialect”—that is, in the loutly locution of an illiterate clown making a trial at his mother-speech. Its “dialect” is so particularly offensive that I suppose it to be a “transcript from nature:” persons from whom it is possible would certainly not deny themselves the happiness of speaking it; and the book may have some value to the hardy philologer tracing backward the line of linguistic evolution to the grunt of the primeval pig. To record the vocal riddances of the ignorant may be one of the purposes of popular fiction, for anything that I know, but at least its authors might, in the interest of art, charge its horrible words with something that one unaffected by softening of the brain might think to be thoughts; and perhaps they would if that pandemic infirmity had not marked them for its own. Male and female created He them. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman furnishes forth her annual output of New-English antiques and detestables, filing their teeth with their tongues, to the inexpressible uncomforting of the auditory nerve. Mary Murfree, in perpetual session on the Delectable Mountains, with a lapful of little clay-eaters and snuff-rubbers, sweats great beads of blood to build the lofty crime and endow it with enough galvanic vitality to stand alone while she reaches for more mud for a new creation. There follows an interminable line of imitators and imitatresses, causing two “dialects” to grow where but one grew before, and rabbiting the literary preserve with a multiplication of impossibles to speak them. And we forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of American letters.