FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psychological prefaces are always
certain to be particularly indecent.

I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry Sandford of England, the
priggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a worthy
American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through
a seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of
fifteen of them the other day. This impossible female is carried from
infancy up to grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still leisurely
pursuing her way down to the tomb in an ecstatic state of uninterrupted
didacticism. There are twenty-five volumes of her and the granddaughter,
who is also christened Elsie, and is her grandmother's own child, with
the same precocious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to her
elders. An interesting instance of hereditary talent!

H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender, graceful, and hollow.
Personally, he is long and narrow, and looks as if he might have
been the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put together, like
an ill-constructed sentence, and affects me like one. His figure is
ungrammatical.

AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in the
spring. Each generation has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were to break into blossom
at the present moment, would probably be left to fade upon the stem.

Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time.
The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as
is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed
with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into