What has become, too, of those learned novels, patterned after Bulwer--extracts from Lemprière in dialogue form, sandwiched with layers of low life? "Surely, my dear niece, you remember what Athenæaus quotes on this subject from the Leontium of Hermesianax of Colophon, the friend of Philetas?" "Perfectly, aunt, and methinks mention is also made of the same elegiac poem in Pausanias, and again in Antoninus Liberalis, the latter saying," etc. Where, I say, are the novels in that vein, with their charming mixture of murder, mythology, and metaphysics? They have their run, strut their brief hour, and give way to some "Madcap Violet" or "Helen's Babies." Never fear a lack of fresh novels. If the lads lose Mayne Reid, they find Jules Verne. The secret is an open one: the novel is the best paid branch of literature--always excepting Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Times have changed since "Evelina" was sold for £20. Perhaps of all novelists Victor Hugo receives the largest earnings for a single work. One of his clerical enemies, Mgr. de Ségur, has bitterly attacked him for his gains--"$100,000 for 'Les Misérables' alone," said the critic in angry extravagance. But Hugo's admirers will not grudge his gains. The English have put a premium on prolix novels by giving them a regulation length of just three volumes, to be cold for a guinea and a half. This droll uniformity has much less basis of reason than the old custom of writing tragedies and comedies just five acts long; for there is sense in making a play last out an evening. Trouble to writer and weariness to reader must come of spinning a novel against space, overlaying a plot with trivial incidents, and stuffing a story with padding, merely to reach a standard of length both arbitrary and absurd. Yet prodigious was the patience of our novel-reading ancestry prior to Fielding. The "Grand Cyrus" was issued in ten volumes, "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight, and sometimes an heroic romance reached twelve. Jules Janin puts Richardson on Shakespeare's level, and modern French readers appreciate "Clarissa" more than English--but they get it abridged. Mr. Dallas, following Janin, has abridged the famous novel with care for English readers, too, and a more recent editor likewise aims to evade its monotony by striking out "tediously unnecessary passages and unimportant details," though old-fashioned readers may still like to take "Clarissa" in all its prolixity. As to the romances that preceded it, they seem to our age duller than any ever written--"huge folios of inanity," said Sir Walter, "over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep." I warrant their descendants never yawned over "Guy Mannering."