When “Peg Woffington” first fell upon us, a dozen years ago or so, Humdrum opened his eyes:  it was like setting one’s teeth in a juicy pear fresh from the warm sunshine.  Then came “Christie Johnstone,” a perfect pearl of its kind, in which we recognize an important contribution to one class of romance.  If ever the literature of the fishing-coast shall be compiled, it will be found to be scanty, but superlative; let us suggest that it shall open with Lucy Larcom’s “Poor Lone Hannah,” the most touching and tearful of the songs of New-England life,—­followed by Christie Johnstone’s night at sea among the blue-lights and the nets with their silver and lightning mixed, where the fishers struggle with that immense sheet varnished in red-hot silver,—­and at the end let not the “Pilot’s Pretty Daughter” of William Allingham’s be forgotten:—­

  “Were it my lot—­there peeped a wish—­
    To hand a pilot’s oar and sail,
  Or haul the dripping moonlit mesh
    Spangled with herring-scale: 
  By dying stars how sweet ’twould be,
  And dawn-blow freshening the sea,
  With weary, cheery pull to shore
  To gain my cottage-home once more,
  And meet, before I reached the door,
      My pretty pilot’s daughter!”

But it is a fine fashion of this noble world never to acknowledge itself too well pleased.  Men are ashamed of satisfaction.  So soon as they have exhausted the honey, they condemn the comb; it will do to wax an old wife’s thread;—­they forget that the cells whose sides break the usual uniformity contain the royal embryos.  Humdrum read these little novels through and through, laughed and cried over them in secret, then pulled a long face, stepped forth and denounced—­the typography.  Now we admit that the page presents a fairer appearance with single punctuations, unblurred by Italics, and its smooth surface unbroken by strings of capitals;—­but let us ask these criticasters for what purpose types were cast at all.  To assist the author in the expression of his ideas, and to elucidate subtile shades of meaning? or to prove his let and hindrance, and to wrap his expression in mystery?  Whether or no, it is patent that Charles Reade makes an exclamation—­and an interrogation-point together say as much as many novelists can dibble over a whole page.  Nevertheless, in his latest work these eccentricities are greatly modified; yet who would forego in the sea-fight that almost inaudible, breathless whisper of “Our ammunition is nearly done”? or again the moment when Skinner pokes Mr. Hardie lightly in the side and says, “But—­I’ve—­got—­the receipt”?  And could anything express the state of young Reginald’s mind so ineffably as the primer type of his letter to Lucy?