occasional verse have never been so happily mimicked as in the _Memoirs of James Higginson, by Himself_, which occur in Letter X of _The Heroine_. Johnson continued to be the most influential teacher of English prose until Macaulay, by introducing a more glittering kind of antithesis and a freer use of the weapons of offence in criticism, usurped his supremacy. A more voluminous and easier literature had enthralled the popular taste for some thirty or forty years before the author of _The Heroine_ delivered his attack. Only a few are now remembered even by name of that horde of romances which issued from the cheap presses, in the train of Mrs. Radcliffe. It is reasonable to suppose that many of them, which had not the help of that great preservative of a bad book, good binding, have perished from off the face of the earth. They are not yet old enough to be precious, as Elizabethan trash is precious, and doubtless the surviving copies of some of them are even now being cast out from lumber-rooms and remote country libraries, to suffer their fate by fire. Their names are scattered plentifully up and down the _Bibliotheca Britannica_ and other monumental compilations, where books that go under in their fight against time have Christian burial and a little headstone reserved for them. In _The Heroine_ only the chief of them are referred to by name. The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe--_The Mysteries of Udolpho_, _The Italian_, and _The Bravo of Venice_--are praised as being 'often captivating and seldom detrimental'. The rivals of Mrs. Radcliffe who wrote those enormously popular works, _The Children of the Abbey_ and _Caroline of Lichtfield_, receive a less respectful treatment. At the close of his book the author of _The Heroine_ summarizes his indictment against these and their kind: 'They present us with incidents and characters which we can never meet in the world; and act upon the mind like intoxicating stimulants; first elevate, and then enervate it. They teach us to revel in ideal scenes of transport and distraction; and harden our hearts against living misery, by making us so refined as to feel disgust at its unpoetical accompaniments.' Throughout the book he keeps up a running fire of criticism. When Cherubina visits Westminster Abbey, 'It is the first,' she says, 'that I have ever seen, though I had read of thousands.' She apologizes for using the vulgar word 'home'--'you know that a mere home is my horror'. She confesses that she is very inadequately armed with religion--'I knew nothing of religion except from novels; and in these, though the devotion of heroines is sentimental and graceful to a degree, it never influences their acts, or appears connected with their moral duties. It is so speculative and generalized, that it would answer the Greek or the Persian church, as well as the Christian; and none but the picturesque and enthusiastic part is presented; such as kissing a cross, chanting a vesper with elevated eyes, or composing a