coins of the realm I dissipated before learning the melancholy truth, that the seductive titles and cuts which form the tours de force of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to the tales themselves, which are like vials of skimmed milk, labeled absinthe, but warranted to be wholly without flavor. Mr. James Payn, who has written very amusingly about the mysterious weekly journals which lie "thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa" upon the counters of small, dark shops, "in the company of cheap tobacco, hardbake, and, at the proper season, valentines," laments with frank asperity that he can find in them neither dramatic interest, nor even impropriety. He has searched them patiently for something wrong, and his quest has been wholly unrewarded. Mr. Thomas Wright, in a paper published some years ago in the "Nineteenth Century," makes a similar complaint. The lovely heroines of these stories are "virtuous even to insipidity," and their heroes are so blamably blameless as to be absolutely revolting. Yet it has been my fate to encounter some very pretty villains in the course of my penny readings, and at least one specimen of
