I have heard these editors denounced, one and all, by infuriated poets and romancers, for the “favoritism” which had been shown to certain contributors, but I have generally found that when they erred in this way it was on the side of charity; and if certain writers whose contributions we generally skip occupy more room in the monthlies than we think they ought to, it is not because they are editorial pets, but because they have been careful students of the great literary principles described in these pages, and have thereby acquired the art of writing exactly what can be printed without injury to the susceptibilities of a single advertiser or subscriber. But we have special cause for being thankful to the magazines when we read some of the hysterical, obstetrical, and epigrammatic romances which have enjoyed such an astonishing vogue in England of late years. Thank Heaven! no American magazine--so far as my knowledge goes--has had the effrontery to offer its readers any such noisome, diseased literature as that with which the alleged “clever” people of London have flooded our market. To my way of thinking the epigrammatic books are the most offensive of the whole lot, and certainly there is nothing better calculated to plunge one into the depths of despair and shame than the perusal of a modern British novel whose characters are forever “showing off,” as children say, and who seem to devote their lives to uttering sixpenny cynicisms and evolving, with infinite pains and travail, the sort of remarks that pass current in the “smart London set”--if these chroniclers are to be believed--as wit. Callow and ingenuous youth betrays itself by two unmistakable earmarks. One of these is in the form of a slight down on the cheek, and the other is the belief that Oscar Wilde writes brilliant epigram. I attended the first American representation of a play by that distinguished author, and can well recall my feelings when an able-bodied mummer took the centre of the stage and said, with the air of a man who has been rolling a good thing under his tongue all the evening, and at last has a chance to utter it: “Time is the thief of procrastination.” A murmur of admiration ran through the house, but I--I sobbed like a heart-broken child. And yet Mr. Wilde is one of the cleverest of the whole brood of fat-witted chromo-cynics whose vulgar flippancies have somehow come to be regarded as witty and amusing, and that, too, by people who ought to know better. It positively makes me sick to see one of these paper-covered chronicles of fashionable imbecility lying on a parlor table, and to hear it spoken of as “so delightfully bright and clever, don’t you know.”