prompt him to make respectful study of his betters. A reasonable
supply of high-class novels might always have been depended upon; the
trouble is that the public now demands that all stories must be of
the upper ten thousand. Auld Robin Grey must be Sir Robert Grey,
South African millionaire; and Jamie, the youngest son of the old
Earl, otherwise a cultured public can take no interest in the ballad.
A modern nursery rhymester to succeed would have to write of Little
Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of the many beautiful eminences
belonging to the ancestral estates of their parents, bearing between
them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted Sevres vase filled with
ottar of roses.

I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine. The heroine is a youthful
Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the
result that they are reduced to living on the first floor of the
Carlton Hotel. The villain is a Russian Prince. The Baronet of a
simpler age has been unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the
times. What self-respecting heroine would abandon her husband and
children for sin and a paltry five thousand a year? To the heroine
of the past--to the clergyman's daughter or the lady artist--he was
dangerous. The modern heroine misbehaves herself with nothing below
Cabinet rank.

I turn to something less pretentious, a weekly periodical that my
wife tells me is the best authority she has come across on blouses.
I find in it what once upon a time would have been called a farce.
It is now a "drawing-room comedietta. All rights reserved." The
dramatis personae consist of the Earl of Danbury, the Marquis of
Rottenborough (with a past), and an American heiress--a character
that nowadays takes with lovers of the simple the place formerly