Well, well, the days for such delights are over. We may say what we please about the rewards of modern novel-writing; but what, after all, is the cold praise of reviewers compared with this open glory and exaltation? It is moderately impressive to be told over and over again by Marie Corelli’s American publishers that the queen of England thinks “The Soul of Lilith” and “The Sorrows of Satan” are good novels; but this mere announcement, however reassuring,--and it is a point on which we require a good deal of reassurance,--does not thrill us with the enthusiasm we should feel if her Majesty, and the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York, and the British public united in a flattering ovation. The incidents which mark the irresistible and unwelcome changes forced upon the world by each successive generation which inhabits it are the incidents we love to read about, and which are generally considered too insignificant for narration. In a single page Addison tells us more concerning the frivolous, idle, half torpid, wholly contented life of an eighteenth-century citizen than we could learn from a dozen histories. His diaries, meant to be purely satiric, have now become instructive. They show us, as in a mirror, the early hours, the scanty ablutions,--“washed hands, but not face,”--the comfortable eating and drinking, the refreshing absence of books, the delightful vagueness and uncertainty of foreign news. A man could interest himself for days in the reported strangling of the Grand Vizier, when no intrusive cablegram came speeding over the wires to silence and refute the pleasant voice of rumor.