“Well,” said the legal gentleman, “I like smart, clever writing, and don’t object to a little personality now and then.  It pays, too.”

“Those things certainly take well,” said the publisher, “but there are other things that take better.”

“What are they?”

“Not at all in your way, Mr. Malcolm; but yet at the present time there is nothing that pays so well as an exciting religious novel on evangelical principles.  Make all your unbelievers and worldly people villians, and crown your heroine, after unheard-of perils and persecutions, with the conversion of her lover, or the lover with the conversion of the heroine—­the one does nearly as well as the other; but do not let them marry before conversion, on any account.  Settle the hero down in the ministry, to which he dedicates talents that you may call as splendid as you please; make your fashionable conversation of your worldly people slightly blackguardly, and that of your pets very inane, with spots of religion coming out very strong now and then, and you will have more readers than Dickens, Bulwer, or Thackeray.  Well-meaning mothers will put the book without fear into the hands of their daughters.  It is considered harmless Sunday reading for those who find Sunday wearisome, and it is thought an appropriate birth-day present for young people of both sexes.  I dare say these books are harmless enough, but their success is wonderfully disproportioned to their merits.  They must be such easy writing, too, for you need never puzzle yourself as to whether it would be natural or consistent for such a character to steal, or for another to murder.  ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,’ and the novelist at least takes no pains to know it.”

“You fire me with a noble zeal and emulation,” said Mr. Malcolm.  “Is it true that the trumpery thing my sister Anne tormented me to order from you last week has gone through five editions?”

“Just about to bring out a sixth,” said the publisher; “and the curious thing is that it is not at all exciting:  but these American domestic quasi-religious novels (though novel is not a proper term for them) are the rage at present.  If one could trust to their details of every-day life being correct, they might be useful as giving us the Americans painted by themselves; but there is so much that is false and improbable in plot and character, that one is tempted to doubt even the cookery, of which we have quantum suff.”

“The conversation is the greatest twaddle I ever saw,” said Mr. Malcolm.  “If the American people talk like that, how fatiguing it would be to live among them!  I could not write so badly, or such bad English.  I must take a successful English novel as my model.”

“Mr. Malcolm is literary himself,” said Miss Rennie, who had left the two students to amuse each other, and now joined the more congenial group.  “He writes such clever things in magazines, Miss Melville, I quite delight to come on anything of his, they are so amusing.”