Wickedness in women is expiated by the joy it affords the saints. We all profess to think well of humanity because we want to be well thought of. It is something to convert one’s enemies, but the disillusion of life comes when one attempts to convert one’s friends. The definition of an immoral story in the eyes of a certain caste of critics and the smugs is one that has a moral. A man who values his peace of mind marries a plain woman. We get a good deal of literature about the Woman with a Past. A woman has not got _a past_ until she begins the folly of repentance. There is something radically wrong with a misanthrope who is not merry and cheerful, for this is a state of mental and moral independence and self-complacency. Another impending catastrophe that looms up large on the literary horizon is a serial publication of the innocuous, but insufferably tedious William Black. This is one of the most notorious modern instances of a writer of fine abilities who has fallen into the slough of mere money making. Black ceased to write anything that really seizes one’s interest almost as long ago as ten years. He has written nothing but guide and patter-book stories of the Scotch highlands since his first legitimate successes, and today he writes simply for the largest audience. The style and workmanship is always up to his own standard, for, of course, he is a good workman, but the charm of a forceful and original mind that we enjoyed in “Shandon Bells” and the rest, is lacking in these later stories, in which the conventional love story of old-fashioned romance is told over and over again, with a background of London and Scotch country houses. Mrs. Humphrey Ward is in the field again. She is the female political and religious prophet of the nonconformist many-headed. She is to contribute an interminable, commonplace snob-novel, dealing with utterly superfluous English “society” and political life, to one of the American magazines for mature sucklings. It is bad enough to get this freak female in books. It is a poor imitation of Anthony Trollope, and it is filled with the profound platitudes that have made the Ward nightmare a ludicrous libel and parody of George Eliot. Such is the taste of the serious minded women readers of our time, that this unendurably tiresome portrayer of merely snob life and snob philosophy is hailed as one of the geniuses of our age.