?'

'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my
pocket-book. "Castle of Wolfenbach," "Clermont,"
"Mysterious Warnings," "Necromancer of the Black Forest,"
"Midnight Bell," "Orphan of the Rhine," and "Horrid Mysteries."
Those will last us some time.'

'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure
they are all horrid?'

'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the
world, has read every one of them.'

After all, human nature is constant, independent of time; and
fashions social, mental, literary, return like fashions in
feminine headgear! Two club women were coming from a city play
house after hearing a particularly lugubrious drama of Ibsen's,
and one was overheard exclaiming to the other: "O isn't Ibsen
just lovely! He does so take the hope out of life!"

Yet the tendency of eighteenth century fiction, with its
handling of the bizarre and sensational, its use of occult
effects of the Past and Present, was but an eddy in a current
which was setting strong and steadily toward the realistic
portrayal of contemporary society.

One other tendency, expressive of a lighter mood, an attempt to
represent society a la mode, is also to be noted during this
half century so crowded with interesting manifestations of a new
spirit; and they who wrote it were mostly women. It is a
remarkable fact that for the fifty years between Sterne and
Scott, the leading novelists were of that sex, four of whom at
least, Burney, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Austen, were of
importance. Of this group the lively Fanny Burney is the
prophet; she is the first woman novelist of rank. Her "Evelina,"
with its somewhat starched gentility and simpering sensibility,
was once a book to conjure with; it fluttered the literary
dovecotes in a way not so easy to comprehend to-day. Yet Dr.
Johnson loved his "little Burney" and greatly admired her work,
and there are entertaining and without question accurate
pictures of the fashionable London at the time of the American
Revolution drawn by an observer of the inner circle, in her
"Evelina" and "Cecilia"; one treasures them for their fresh
spirit and lively humor, nor looks in them for the more serious
elements of good fiction. She contributes, modestly, to that
fiction to which we go for human documents. No one who has been
admitted to the privileges of Miss Bur