of fierce melodrama and meek domestic sentiment; short dialogues and paragraphs on the French pattern, with English moral reflections of the sort that occur on the top lines of children's copybooks; descriptions and conversations for the beginning of the number, and a 'strong situation' dragged in by the neck and shoulders for the end." It was in the Answers to Correspondents, however, that the distinguished novelist confesses he took the keenest delight,—in the punctilious reader, who is anxious to know the correct hour at which to visit a newly married couple; in the practical reader, who asks how to make crumpets and liquid blacking; in the sentimental reader, who has received presents from a gentleman to whom she is not engaged, and desires the editor's sanction for the deed; in the timorous reader, who is afraid of a French invasion and of dragonflies. The scraps of editorial wisdom doled out to these benighted beings were, in Wilkie Collins's opinion, well worth the journal's modest price. He was rejoiced to know that "a sensible and honorable man never flirts himself, and ever despises flirts of the other sex." He was still more pleased to be
