This digression may be wide of the subject of novel reading, but the real novel reader is at home anywhere. He has thoughts, dreams, reveries, fancies. All the world is his novel and all actions are stories and all the actors are characters. When Lucile Western, the excellent American actress, was at the height of her powers, not long before her last appearances, she had as her leading man a big, slouchy and careless person, who was advertised as “the talented young English actor, William Whally.” In the intimacies of private association he was known as Bill Whally, and his descent was straight down from “Mount Sinai's awful height.” He was a Hebrew and no better or more uneven and reckless actor ever played melodramatic “heavies.” He had a love for Shakespeare, but could not play him; he had a love of drink and could gratify it. His vigorous talents purchased for him much forbearance. I've seen Mr. Whally play the fastidious and elegant “Sir Archibald Levison” in shiny black doe-skin trousers and old-fashioned cloth gaiters, because his condition rendered the problem of dressing somewhat doubtful, though it could not obscure his acting. He was the only walking embodiment of “Bill Sykes” I ever saw, and I contracted the habit of going to see him kill Miss Western as “Nancy” because he butchered that young woman with a broken chair more satisfactorily than anybody else I ever saw. There was a murderer for you--Bill Sykes! Bad as he was in most things, let us not forget that--he--killed--Nancy--and--killed--her--well and--thoroughly. If that young woman didn't snivel herself under a just sentence of death, I'm no fit householder to serve on a jury. Every time Miss Western came around it was my custom to read up fresh on “Oliver Twist” and hurry around and enjoy Bill Whally's happy application of retribution with the aid of the old property chair. There were six other persons whom I succeeded in persuading to applaud the scene with me every time it was acted. But there's a separate chapter for villains. * * * * * Let us return to the old novels. What curious pranks time plays with tastes and vogues. Forty years ago N. P. Willis was just faded. Yet he was long a great comet of literary glitter and obscured many men of much greater ability. Everybody read him; the annuals hung upon his name; the ladies regarded him as a finer and more dashing Byron than Byron. The place he filled was much like that of Congreve, before whom Shakespeare's great nose was out of joint for a long time; Congreve, who was the margarita aluminata major of English poesy and drama and public life, and is now found in junk stores and in the back line on book shelves and whom nobody reads now. Willis had his languid affectations, his superficial cynicism and added to them ostentatious sentimentality.