stretch of imagination, I can picture a fat mamma glancing casually at _Belgravia_, the while she watches her eldest girl's flirtation with a "moneyed" suitor out of the corner of her eye; I can also deem it possible that a paunchy paterfamilias might cut the pages of _Temple Bar_ and hand it in as a delicate attention to his children's governess in the schoolroom. But further than this I cannot go. It may be that the magazines exist for the domestic circle only--the English domestic circle, of course. For other countries' domestic circles they would not serve. I think all those interesting females who are understood to be "good mothers," ladies with high maternal foreheads and small chins, very likely read the magazines. They do not want to study, they do not want to learn, they never require to read anything but the tamest stuff, just to pass away an hour between lunch and afternoon-tea. These are the only individuals I can connect with magazine literature. But, of course, I may be wrong. There may be intellectual persons who accept the varied utterances of the _Nineteenth Century_ and _Fortnightly_ as gospel. I can understand any one liking the _Review of Reviews_. That serves a purpose, and is admirably done. Apart from its adoration of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, it is really an excellently managed concern. That and the _Century_ suffice me--the American _Century_ I mean, not the Nineteenth Century, which will hardly enter the Twentieth. Quite recently, one Edward Delille severely slated the American press and American literature generally, with the hysterical passion of those lady-writers who, to use reviewer's parlance, "let down their back hair and scream." Rather unkind of Edward, considering that rumour asserts him to be American himself. A man should stick up for his own country or get re-nationalised. Does Delille find English magazine literature superior to that of America? If he does, he deserves his fate! Let him wallow, as I did, in the Slough of Despond, till he groweth weary, and when he crieth, "Help! release me!" let no one answer. For the Slough is the ruin of all originally-minded men; and any novelist who writes magazine serials is simply committing literary suicide. His name grows stale to the public ear, his stories lose point, his style lacks proper warmth, and his very thoughts grow crippled. In a work of true art the creator should be free as air and answerable to none, not even to that Olympian god, a magazine editor.