Before returning to the social centre from our excursus into the wilds, it is proper to pause for an instant in the temple of letters and note a tablet on the walls. It is an old saying that "there is nothing new under the sun"; and it may surprise some readers to learn that the feminine preponderance in the fiction of the present, and even the growing tendency to laud precocity in authorship, are not without warrant in the earlier history of our nation's literature. Long ago Hannah Hill, the author of that cheerful tract called _A Legacy for Children: Last Expressions and Dying Words_, wrote and published a book when at the immature age of eleven; and even the present day cannot as yet surpass that piece of absurdity. More significant, however, is the fact that the first American novel was the work of a woman. Susanna Haswell was not of American birth, but she came to this country as a mere child and may fairly be claimed as a product of our soil, at least as far as her literary genius is concerned. In 1786 she published a work called _Victoria_, and, two years later, _The Inquisitor_. She then went to England with her lately married spouse, William Rowson, for a three years' residence; and it was during her absence from the country that she published the most famous of her works, _Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth_. It is this latter work that, with our national cheerful disregard for facts, is generally termed the "First American Novel," the existence of its predecessors and the fact of its foreign birth being entirely disregarded. However, the book was in its day a great success, having what was then an enormous sale--twenty-five hundred copies within a few years. While the style is of the most theatrical kind, the characters posing alternately in the front of the stage as they become the speakers, and the language is turgid to excess, the book is not without some merits. It is all impossible enough; but that forms little detriment to popularity even now, and the fact that no man or woman ever talked as talk Mrs. Rowson's characters does not make the work peculiar among its kind. It was published in 1892 in cheap form, but met with little welcome; yet it remains as a monument in our literature because of its titular position therein, though _Victoria_ was the first American novel in point of time. Mrs. Rowson returned to this country immediately after the publication of _Charlotte Temple_, and continued to write--pouring forth a full stream of plays, songs, stories, and even school books--until her death in Boston in 1824.