Does anybody read William Gilmore Simm's elaborate rhetoric disguised as novels? He must have written two dozen of them, the Richardson of the United States. Lovers of delicious wit and intellectual humor still read Dr. Holmes' essays, but it would probably take a physician's prescription to make them swallow the novels. In what dark corners of the library are Bayard Taylor's novels and travels hidden? Will you come into the garden, Maud, and read Chancellor Walworth's mighty tragedies and Miss Mulock's Swiss-toy historical novels, or will you beg off, like the honest girl you are, and take a nap? Your sleepiness, dear Miss Maud, does you credit. By the way, what the deuce is the name of anyone of these novels? I can recall “Elsie Vernier,” by Dr. Holmes and then there is a blank. But what classics they were--then! In the thick of them had appeared a newspaper story that struggled through and was printed in book form. Old friends have told me how they waited at the country post-offices to get a copy, delayed for weeks. It was a scandal to read it in some localities. It was fiercely attacked as an outrageous exaggeration produced by temporary excitement and hostile feeling, or praised as a new gospel. It has been translated into every tongue having a printing press, and has sold by millions of copies. It was “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” It was not a classic, but what a vigorous immortal mongrel of human sentiment it was! What a row was kicked up over Miss Braddon's “Octoroon,” and what an impossible yellowback it was! The toughest piece of fiction I met with as a boy was “Sanford and Merton,” and I've been aching to say so for four pages. If this world were full of Sanfords and Mertons, then give me Jupiter or some other comfortable planet at a secure sanitary distance removed. I can't even remember the writers who were grammatically and rhetorically perfect forty years ago, and also very dull with it all. Is there a bookshelf that holds “Leni Leoti, or The Flower of the Prairies?” There are “Jane Eyre,” “Lady Audley's Secret,” and “John Halifax, Gentleman,” which will go with many and are all well worth the reading, too. Are Mrs. Eliza A. Dupuy, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz and Augusta J. Evans dead? Their novels still live--look at the book stores. “Linda, or the Young Pilot of the Belle Creole,” “India, the Pearl of Pearl River,” “The Planter's Northern Bride,” “St. Elmo”--they were fiction for you! A boy old enough to have a first sweetheart could swallow them by the mile. You remember, when we were boys, the circus acrobats always--always, remember--rubbed young children with snake-oil and walloped them with a rawhide to educate them in tumbling and contortion? Well, if I could get the snake-oil for the joints and a curly young wig, I'd like to get back at five hundred of those books and devour them again--“as of yore!” VI. RASCALS BEING A DISCOURSE UPON GOOD, HONEST SCOUNDRELISM AND VILLAINS.