As we look back upon the list of the great authors who have written in the present century, it must be with a feeling of gratitude for the benefits they have conferred.  They have devoted their lives to the production of literary works, the beauty and excellence of which have incalculably elevated the public taste.  They have held up ideals and noble conceptions which insensibly impart a dignity to life, and an encouragement to youthful aspiration.  They have described so truthfully and sympathetically the character and aims of different classes and different peoples, that whoever reads their works cannot but feel himself drawn nearer to great divisions of the human race, which he had hitherto regarded with an indifferent or a prejudiced eye.  The novels of Scott, of Dickens, of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Miss Austen, of Miss Ferrier, of very many others, have afforded to hundreds of thousands, young and old, a never failing source of healthful entertainment.  Domestic life, as well in the cottage as the castle, has been cheered and enlivened by their presence.  Their examples of heroism, of patience, of generosity, have excited the emulation of the young, while their pictures of selfishness and vice have stifled many an evil inclination and have given birth to many a good resolution.

Such writers as these have expressed the best tendencies of the age.  And they have been able to do so because they themselves are among the best men and women of their time.  But, unfortunately, as the nineteenth century has many evil characteristics, and as depraved and weak-minded persons are often endowed with some literary capacity, a great deal of poisonous matter has unavoidably come to the surface in English fiction.  The writers who have prostituted their talents in pandering to the low tastes of their readers, have carefully avoided any such open representation of vice as was permissible in the last century.  But they have hidden under an outward respectability of words the most immoral and degrading thoughts.  They have recognized the fact that a not inconsiderable number of persons would be be glad to find in a work of fiction the same gross ideas which occupy their own minds.  And thus a more dangerous, because a more insidious, species of literature has sprung up.  The absence of parental censorship, the general freedom with which works of fiction are allowed to enter almost every household, permit these novels to fall into the hands of the youngest and most susceptible.  The young girl or boy whose parents carefully put away the newspaper which contains an account of a divorce trial or a rape, is very possibly reading a novel of which the main interest lies in a detailed description of a seduction.  It is not of the so-called “dime novels” or of the stories published in a police gazette to which reference is made, but to books issued by respectable publishers and often written by women.  Of these novels, the subject is the unlawful gratification