the big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties.  But waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read.  Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid, and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased.  Out of such circumstances the circulating library was hatched.

The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees.  Pressure was put on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty, outside public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the elite could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year.  English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature.  English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more, were no longer procurable.  But at this point human nature intervened; poor human nature! when you pinch it in in one place it bulges out in another, after the fashion of a lady’s figure.  Human nature has from the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words “dirty stories” in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal.  Call it a disease if you will—­an incurable disease—­which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence.  This is exactly what has happened.  Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the most moral people on the face of the earth.  It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation.  But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting Mudie.  True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we still continued to go to church, true it is that we turned our faces away when Mdlle. de Maupin or the Assommoir was spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie might wish us; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, “I have scorched the evil one out of the villa; the head of the serpent is crushed for evermore;” but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land.  Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.