_To Helen_, a poem as beautiful as a Greek gem and
as musical as Apollo's lute.

Good novelists are much rarer than good sons, and none of us would part
readily with Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby. Still, the fact remains that a
man who was affectionate and loving to his children, generous and
warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are the very bacchanalia of
benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the groundlings laugh, and
this fact every biographer of Dickens should face and, if possible,
explain.

No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor.

What we do not know about Shakespeare is a most fascinating subject, and
one that would fill a volume, but what we do know about him is so meagre
and inadequate that when it is collected together the result is rather
depressing.

They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

Rossetti's was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not
easily survive shilling primers.

We are sorry to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare,
as we had always been of opinion that this was a privilege reserved
specially for our English actors.

Biographies of this kind rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder,
add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were
anonymous.

A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who
knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and
tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants
for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to
gape at. Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his
nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated
notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years
after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular
biographies, sandwiched between the author of _Pickwick_ and the Great
Lexicographer.

We sincerely hope that a few more novels like these will be published, as
the public will then find out that a bad book is very dear at a shilling.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of
place is history. In novels they are detestable.

Shilling literature is always making demands on our credulity without
ever appealing to our imagination.

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in
art, as in politics, there is a great futur