The novels of Julia Pardoe, like those of Mrs. Bray, owe their value, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the comparatively unknown places to which she introduces her readers. She accompanied her father, Major Pardoe, to Constantinople, where they were entertained by natives of high position, to whom they had letters of introduction, and Miss Pardoe was the guest of their wives in the harem. Her knowledge of the mode of life and habits of thought of Turkish women is considered second only to that of Mary Wortley Montagu. The material for her story _The Romance of the Harem_ was obtained during her visits to these Turkish ladies. In this she has caught the languid, heavily perfumed atmosphere of the Orient. Besides the main plot, stories of adventure and love are related which beguiled the slowly passing hours of the inmates of the seraglio. Some of them might have been told by Schehezerhade, if she had wished to add to her entertainment of _The Thousand and One Nights_. After Miss Pardoe's return to England, she wrote a series of fashionable novels, inferior to many of those of Mrs. Gore, and better than the best of those by Lady Blessington. _Confessions of a Pretty Woman_, _The Jealous Wife_, and _The Rival Beauties_ were the most popular of these, although they have long since been forgotten. In 1849, Miss Pardoe published a collection of stories under the title _Flies in Amber_. The title, she explains in the preface, was suggested by a belief of the Orientals that amber comes from the sea, and attracts about it all insects, which find in it both a prison and a posthumous existence. Some of the stories of this collection were gathered in her travels. _An Adventure in Bithynia_, _The Magyar and the Moslem, or an Hungarian Legend_, and the _Yèrè-Batan-Seraï_, which means Swallowed-up Palace, the great subterranean ruin of Constantinople, have the interest which always attaches to tales gathered by travellers in unfrequented places. * * * * * Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of the more famous author Anthony Trollope, like Miss Pardoe, found material for stories in unfamiliar places. Mrs. Trollope had the nature of the pioneer. With her family, she sought our western lands of the Mississippi Valley, where the virgin forest had resounded to the axe of the first settler but a short time before. She wrote the first book of any note describing the manners of the Americans; the first strong novel calling attention to the evils of slavery in our Southern States; and the first one describing graphically the white slavery in the cotton-mills of Lancashire; and she is, perhaps, the only writer who began a long literary career at the age of fifty-two.