Yet who would willingly forget the terror of that moment when Crusoe discovers the footprints on the lonely shore? I fancy many a lad has borne testimony to the genius of De Foe by popping his curly pate beneath the bed clothes at that awful juncture, in as great fright as if he himself had just seen the track in the sand. Or perhaps, living by the seaside, he has rowed his wherry to some neighboring bunch of rocks, to take possession of it, Crusoe fashion, bribing some less enthusiastic companion to act the rôle of Friday, until, unworthy of his faithful prototype, the extemporized Friday sulks and throws off his allegiance. I lately heard that Crusoe's isle was now tenanted by industrious German colonists, who had planted and stocked it, not like Robinson, but under all agricultural advantages, and that Juan Fernandez was a regular entrepot for whale ships. Think of it! Yankee tars revictual where the lonely mariner saw cannibals feasting! But it is only Selkirk's domain that is thus invaded; Crusoe's right there is none to dispute; safe in the keeping of genius, his monarchy can no more be annexed by filibuster or colonist than the magic isle of Prospero. Musing on popular novels, one is struck by the changes of fashion in fiction. Who now reads "Clarissa," which Dr. Johnson pronounced the first book of the world for knowledge of the human heart; which D'Alembert styled unapproachably greater than any romance ever written in any language; for which Diderot predicted an immortality as illustrious as that of Homer? Who reads "Cecilia," which Burke sat up all night to read? The romances over which our great grandmothers simpered and sighed are to our age intolerable bores. Reade, not Richardson, is the man for our money; Miss Braddon, not Miss Burney, is the rage at the circulating libraries. Whither are gone those stories that a few years ago could not be printed fast enough--"The Lamplighter," "Hot Corn," and the rest of that brood? They are hidden under dust in the alcoves, or have been carted off to the pulp mill. Could mind of man have fancied, an oblivion so swift for those favorites of the public? Could mortal ken have foretold its present fate for the "Wide, Wide World"?--a story now quite dropped out of sight, but once the town's rage, and whose heroine I remember as a sort of inexhaustible human watering cart with the tear tap always turned on.