And since we have promised that instruction shall go hand in hand with castigation we will not close until we have pointed out for the future guidance of those who may wish to avoid one at least of the many by-paths of reprobation, that in any novel we regard the existence of page Four Hundred of readable type as confession on the part of both Publisher and Author that neither of them has yet learned the foremost and greatest of the arts of their trade—the art to blot. _De confessis sicuti de manifestis—supplicium sumendum est._ A TRINITY OF OFFENDERS. 1. THE LAND OF THE SUN, _a third rate guide-book to Mexico, and incidentally a Touter for one of its Railways_; by Christian Reid, a woman who once wrote a good novel, superfluously illustrated, 12mo. cloth, pp. 355. D. Appleton & Co., N. Y., $1.75. 2. LOVE IN IDLENESS, by F. Marion Crawford, author of ETC., _etc._, & etc., absurdly illustrated, crown 8vo., cloth, gilt-edge, pp. 218. Macmillan & Co., N. Y., $2.00. 3. ADVICE TO LITERARY ASPIRANTS—_One Hundred Ways to Become Famous for One Dollar_, by Mr. Arthur Lewis, illustrated, 12mo., pp. 247. Dodd, Rott & Co., N. Y., $1.00. 1. We are but too familiar, all of us, with the devices of the quack-medicine advertiser, his trick of getting us to read his puff in spite of ourselves. It is an old yet still successful dodge. The first sentence in a column of the morning paper promises a little ten minute romance. As we proceed our interest quickens. We inadvertently glance to the end to learn whether the hero is destined to the rope or the heroine reserved for the altar. There stands forth the mark of the Beast, “_Butcher’s Bilious Bouncer_, sure cure for the Liver, price ten cents.” According as nature has allied us to Democritus or to Archilochus we laugh or swear at our gullibility while we turn to some other item, but if fair-minded men we do not swear at the editor, for we know that he lives by letting for hire his numberless columns with no restriction on his advertisers save that their matter does not exclude his paper from the United States Mail. It is far different, however, when trusting in an author’s name or at least in the imprint of a publisher of high standing, a man takes up a book which he has bought in the expectation of finding it a readable or at all events a genuine novel, but soon discovers it to be a string of sausages, whose thin membrane of such romance as it does afford exists merely to encase a solid stuffing of railroad advertisements, “scenic route” business and such secondhand truck. Yet of such is the _Land of the Sun_. Before reading it myself I tendered it to a friend in answer to his request for the latest novel. A few days after, he returned it saying, “It opens more like an advertisement of the Bullseye Parlor Car Company.”