on board as lost. She touched at Provincetown, Massachusetts, October 26th, for supplies, and dropped anchor in New London Harbor on the morning of the 30th, after an absence of fifteen months.

Her mission was fully accomplished. The practical and scientific results of the voyage equal the most sanguine hopes of its projectors, and show that Arctic colonization is as practicable as African colonization, and can possibly be made as profitable, if profit alone is desired.

It is to be hoped that Congress will take a broad and generous view of the subject, and, appreciating in its true spirit the devotion of the men who left the comforts of home to winter within the Arctic seas, enable them to plant the American flag as far to the north as human endurance and human pluck can carry it.

HENRY W. HOWGATE.

NOVEL-WRITING has become a business, almost a trade. Of those who engage in it, nearly all-the exceptions being very rare— do so merely for the purpose of making money by supplying a demand. For there has come to be, and indeed there has long been in existence in regard to novels, that first factor in the equation of the political economists, a demand; this demand being something very different from the interest awakened by the appearance of a book showing great original power, such for example as "Waverley," "The Pickwick Papers," "Vanity Fair," "The Scarlet Letter," "Adam Bede," or "Jane Eyre." There are millions of people in England, and millions in America, and almost millions in Australia, to whose enjoyment of life novels are almost as necessary as food is to their life itself, every one of whom asks month by month, almost week by week, a new story. They, many of them, take some credit to themselves for the time they pass in "reading"; complacently contrasting themselves with idlers and those who are given up to the frivolities of life. A vain and foolish notion! for there is probably no more insidious form of laziness, no method of passing time more absolutely void of exertion of any kind, than novel-reading, as novels are read by most of those for whom they are written. As a child opens its mouth and has sugarplums put into it, so the ordinary novel-reader sits quietly and thoughtlessly, and has a story poured through his eyes into his mind, or into what serves him in that capacity. It is in quite another spirit and with another purpose that great works of imagination are approached by those who can appreciate them.

To meet this demand for novels, thousands of pens are constantly employed. The work of most of them never sees the light; but of the number that are set before the public, the general reader has probably no just notion. Moderately rating the number published yearly in London as three hundred, we may be sure VOL. CXXVIII.-NO. 266.

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that fifty are published in the United States during the same time, which makes about one new English novel for every "week-day " in the year. Of this mass of fiction nearly the whole passes at once into oblivion. And yet not only is the writing of a good novel the great literary achievement of the day, but good novels are written more and more frequently year by year; as, when all men were soldiers, to be a valiant soldier and a great captain was the highest of all distinctions, and valiant soldiers were common and great captains were not rare; as, when London was full of playwrights and new plays were comparatively as common as new novels are now, the Elizabethan drama came into life, and above the crowd of successful men rose Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher. The great distinction is that which is won in the face of many competitors; and much competition exalts the standard of excellence.

Really good novels are, however, rare enough; so rare in proportion to the numbers of the people who read them, that the production of one is not only a sure distinction but a certain source of considerable money profit. Since the appearance of "Daniel Deronda" only one good novel, or perhaps it might be said two, have been published in England. Of the better of these Anthony Trollope is the author. His last novel has a name that would have deterred the public from reading it had it been the work of an unknown writer. Why he should have given it so ridiculous a title as "Is he Popenjoy ?" when "The Dean" or "The Dean's Daughter" would have been so much better and so much more appropriate and descriptive, it is difficult to divine. The representation of character, of which Miss Burney in "Evelina" gave the Englishreading world, if not the first, at least the most conspicuous and successful early example, has gradually become the one great purpose of the novel-writer. To this Mr. Trollope adds, incidentally perhaps, but surely not unconsciously, the portraiture of the society of his day. There is in all literature nothing like the picture which is presented in his novels of the social life of England in the middle of the nineteenth century. The truthfulness of the picture is confessed by those whom it represents. It is not merely vividly imagined, as an untrue thing may be and seem real, as for example Carlyle's Robespierre. It is "the form and pressure of the time." Even the most intelligent and fastidious women in the society which Mr. Trollope's novels represent admit that he portrays that society with absolute faithfulness; they con

fess that he makes them act and talk to each other just as they do act and talk in their every-day life; and this admission they make in regard to him alone of all those who have undertaken to represent the higher classes of English society, Bulwer-Lytton not excepted. This being the case, it is worthy of remark by the way that Trollope's social pictures conform so nearly as they do to the traits of corresponding life in this country. That in the former certain men are called lords, or deans, or what not, and that there are great houses, and parks, and a tenantry, and fox-hunting, and so forth, are incidents for which allowance is to be made, but which do not touch the soul or even the substance of the picture. These are the mere outside, the accidents of the life that is set before us. It remains none the less true that as Mr. Trollope's personages pass before us singly or in groups in the familiar intercourse of their every-day life, the sense of reality and of intimacy is so strongly awakened in us that we have sometimes a sense of shame, as if we were watching our friends and neighbors from behind a curtain, or listening to them through the crack of a door. No such effect as this is produced by the best work of the best novelists of France or of Germany.

In Mr. Trollope's last novel he is, however, less in sympathy than usual with his American readers. The great personage of the book, the one that gives the story its strength and vitality, is Dean Lovelace; and the conditions of his life and the springs of his action are practically so unknown to us that, although we can understand them and may sympathize with them, we yet constantly feel their foreignness. The Dean of Brotherton is the son of a well-to-do livery-stable-keeper. This is his origin. As to himself, he is a man of character, of ability, of the highest culture, of fine presence, of personal dignity, and of unexceptionable manners. Moreover, he is a tenderly loving father, and a man whose life is sweetened by good nature, and whose passage through the world is made easy by humor, that sovereign and subtile lubricant. That such a man, even after he had become wealthy and attained the position of a dean, should be hampered by his origin, and should find it so in the way of his complete and proper recognition, and of the happiness of his daughter in the society into which they are thrown-that it becomes, next to that daughter's happiness and as a means thereto, the chief object of his life to assert himself socially, and to bring certain persons, people of rank among those about him, to a thoroughly respectful consideration of him and his daugh

ter-is almost incomprehensible to those who have not been very directly under the influence of aristocratic institutions. Be this as it may, the man is an admirable creation. He will not suffer by comparison with Archdeacon Grantly or with Mrs. Proudie. And the difference between him and the Archdeacon is worthy of remark; the distinction is so fine and yet so clear, and it is so plainly produced, almost if not altogether by their difference of birth and early breeding. And yet the difference between them is as clearly distinguishable as if they were men of opposite natures and circumstances, although the difference-the inner unlikeness in character-is produced mainly by self-consciousness. The Archdeacon is conscious that, besides being archdeacon, he is a gentleman of recognized position. There are other men indeed who may take precedence of him, as there are men who may take precedence of a duke; but his position as a gentleman is as clearly acknowledged as a duke's, and it is not necessary for him to assert it, or to trouble himself at all about it. Dean Lovelace, on the other hand, knowing that he has every other advantage of the Archdeacon's but that one, feels constantly the lack of the assuredness which it would give him; and in this consciousness on the part of the two men lies chiefly the difference between them in their actions, and it may almost be said their characters. The Dean of Brotherton, in his union of worldly wisdom and a sleepless ambition with perfect honor, with kindliness and good-fellowship, and with a capacity of tenderest love for his daughter, is one of Mr. Trollope's happiest conceptions, and one of those which he has been most perfectly successful in delineating. He has never shown a clearer eye or a steadier hand.

The other personage in this book who commands most attention, and who also removes it from American sympathy, is the Marquis of Brotherton, who is a pendant to Thackeray's Marquis of Steyne, but a far more detestable character. Steyne's part might possibly be played here by a very rich, a very important, and a very coarse-minded man; but a Brotherton in America would be impossible. He is not very rich, for a Stewart or a Vanderbilt might buy him over and over again; nor is he a man of much importance. But he is a marquis, rich, and the head of the family; and, having the position given to him by these circumstances, he is able to tyrannize over his mother and sisters, to be brutally insolent to his brother, and to make himself pestilently offensive to the world in general, with impunity. The Marquis of Brotherton is a