add to the crowd of futilities that choke the market; and, if you have it in you to write a novel which shall be a good piece, you are handicapping yourself by placing a bad novel on your record.  People sin out of thoughtlessness, as well as depravity, and we would not say that every amateur novelist is, ex officio, infamous, nefarious, and felonious.  He or she may be only rather vain, conceited, and unreflecting.

Where, then, is the remedy if homilies fail to convert the sinner, as, indeed, it is the misfortune of homilies to fail?  The remedy will be found in a Novelists’ League, with tickets, and boycotting, and strikes, and rattening, and all the other devices for getting our own way in an oppressive world.  There will be a secret society of professionals.  Lady novelists (amateurs) will be rattened; their blotting-paper and French dictionaries will be stolen or destroyed; their publishers will be boycotted by all members of the League, who will decline to publish with any man known to deal with amateurs.  Nay, so powerful is this dread and even criminal confederacy, that amateurs will not even be reviewed.  Neither the slashing, nor the puffing, nor the faintly praising notice will be meted out to them.  There will be a conspiracy of silence.  The very circulating libraries will be threatened, and coffins (stolen from undertakers who dabble in romance) will be laid at Mr. Mudie’s door, unless he casts off the amateur in fiction.  The professionals will march through rapine to emancipation.  They will strike off the last gyves that fetter the noble art of romance, and in five or six years we shall have only about a tenth of the present number of romances, but that tenth will pass through as many editions as “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which, by the way, was probably, like Ronsard’s poems, the work of an amateur.  But these were other times, when an author did not expect to make money, and thought himself lucky if, after a slashing personal review by the Inquisition, his fragments were not burned at the stake in a bonfire of his volumes.

SOME RARE THINGS FOR SALE.

An American writer has been complaining lately that his countrymen have lost the habit of reading.  This is partly the result of that free trade in English books which is the only form of free trade that suits the American Constitution.  People do not buy American books any longer, because they can get English works, mere printed rags, but paying nothing to English authors, for a few cents.  The rags, of course, fall to pieces, and are tossed into the waste-paper basket, and thus a habit of desultoriness and of abstention from books worth styling books grows and grows, like a noxious and paralysing parasite, over the American intellect.  In this way our pleasant vices are made instruments to plague us, and the condition of the law, which leaves the British authors at the mercy of the Aldens and Monros of the States, is beginning to react on the buyers of goods indelicately obtained.  Even newspaper articles are becoming, it is said, a heavy and a weary weight on the demoralised attention, and people are ceasing to read anything but brief and probably personal paragraphs, such as “Joaquin Miller has had his hair cut.”