my feature in the character of young ladies and
gentlemen of a particular type that they have ceased to care for Dickens,
as they have ceased to care for Scott. They say they cannot read
Dickens. When Mr. Pickwick's adventures are presented to the modern
maid, she behaves like the Cambridge freshman. "Euclide viso, cohorruit
et evasit." When he was shown Euclid he evinced dismay, and sneaked off.
Even so do most young people act when they are expected to read "Nicholas
Nickleby" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." They call these masterpieces "too
gutterly gutter;" they cannot sympathize with this honest humour and
conscious pathos. Consequently the innumerable references to Sam Weller,
and Mrs. Gamp, and Mr. Pecksniff, and Mr. Winkle which fill our ephemeral
literature are written for these persons in an unknown tongue. The
number of people who could take a good pass in Mr. Calverley's Pickwick
Examination Paper is said to be diminishing. Pathetic questions are
sometimes put. Are we not too much cultivated? Can this fastidiousness
be anything but a casual passing phase of taste? Are all people over
thirty who cling to their Dickens and their Scott old fogies? Are we
wrong in preferring them to "Bootle's Baby," and "The Quick or the Dead,"
and the novels of M. Paul Bourget?

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROPOSALS.

There is no subject in the whole range of human affairs so interesting to
a working majority of the race as the theory and practice of proposals of
marriage. Men perhaps cease to be very much concerned about the ordeal
when they have been through it. But the topic never loses its charm for
the fair, though they are presumed only to wait and to listen, and never
to speak for themselves. That this theory has its exceptions appears to
be the conviction of many novelists. They not only make their young
ladies "lead up to it," but heroines occasionally go much further than
that, and do more than prompt an inexperienced wooer. But all these
things are only known to the world through the confessions of novelists,
who, perhaps, themselves receive confessions. M. Goncourt not long ago
requested all his fair readers to send him notes of their own private
experience. How did you feel when you were confirmed? How did Alphonse
whisper his passion? These and other questions, quite as intimate, were
set by M. Goncourt. He meant to use the answers, with all discreet
reserve, in his next novel. Do English novelist