In exceptional cases, a reviewer perhaps exclaims upon certain faults as “womanish”; but the cry is too hasty; the faults are those of individuals, in either sex. It is possible to match them from the work of men, and to adduce examples of women’s work entirely free from them. Colonel Higginson has pointed out that the ivory-miniature method in favor with some of our masculine artists is that of Jane Austen. Wherein do Miss Sprague’s “Earnest Trifler,” or “The Daughter of Henry Sage Rittenhouse,” display more salient indications of sex than works of similar scope by Mr. Henry James? “The almost entire disappearance of the distinctively woman’s novel,”—that is, the novel designed expressly for feminine readers, such as “The Wide, Wide World,” and “The Lamplighter,”—has lately been commented upon. It is to be observed that this species—chiefly produced in the past by women, as the Warner sisters, Maria S. Cummins, Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, the excellent Miss McIntosh—has become nearly extinct at the very time when women are supplying a larger proportion of fiction than ever before; and, further, that the comparatively few “domestic semi-pious” novels very popular in late years have been of masculine production. The original and suggestive, though perhaps at times over-subtle, work of Mrs. Whitney, thoroughly impregnated with the New England spirit, and portraying, with insight, various phases of girlhood, takes another rank. Whatever may be concluded from the decadence of fiction written of women, for women, by women, it is certainly probable that women will remain, as a rule, the best writers for girls. In connection with this subject must be mentioned the widely known and appreciated stories of Louisa M. Alcott, “Little Women,” and its successors,—which “have not only been reprinted and largely sold in England, but also translated into several foreign languages, and thus published with persistent success.” We are told that when “Little Men” was issued, “its publication had to be delayed until the publishers were prepared to fill advanced orders for fifty thousand copies.” A like popularity is to be noted of the spirited and artistic “Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates,” of Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge; which “has had a very large circulation in America; has passed through several editions in England; and has been published in French at Paris, in German at Leipsic, in Russian at St. Petersburg, and in Italian at Rome.... The crowning tribute to its excellence is its perennial sale in Holland in a Dutch edition.” No name in our juvenile literature so “brings a perfume in the mention” as that of Mrs. Dodge, who for years has been as “the very pulse of the machine” in the production of that ideal magazine for children, which is not only an ever-new delight but a genuine educational power.