As I have indicated above, there are, of course, many other more or less well-known writers for girls whose names, however, it is only possible now to mention: Miss Maggie Symington, Miss E. Prentiss, Miss E. Holmes, Miss Holt, Miss Julia Goddard, Miss Meade, and Mrs. Emma Marshall. A word should be said of the works of the latter. Mrs. Marshall has written several good stories for girls. Court and Cottage, Dorothy's Daughters, Violet Douglas, Helen's Diary, and Cassandra's Casket, are among their number. Mrs. Marshall is for ever describing girls who blunder: Cassandra's Casket and Court and Cottage both deal with girls who go to live with relations, and who are always getting into scrapes. She writes with the purpose of showing parents and guardians the misery which may be caused to children by failure to understand them. All the anxieties and trouble created by Elfrida in Court and Cottage arise simply from her aunts giving her an impression that they do not care for her. In No. XIII. The Story of the Lost Vestal, Mrs. Marshall has gone quite out of the beaten track, and has given her readers an instructive and entertaining fiction founded on recent discoveries in the Roman forum. Mrs. Marshall does not do justice to herself as a writer. It was Lord Maintree's voice, who was walking swiftly from the gates leading to the stable,' is a specimen of the manner in which she frequently bungles her English.

To turn from girls' books to girls' magazines, there are two onlyThe Girls' Own Paper and Every Girl's Magazine-that could be placed advantageously in the hands of anybody, to say nothing of young ladies in their teens. Several girls' magazines have been started in the last few years, but they have speedily died or lapsed into the penny dreadful, composed of impossible love stories, of jealousies, murders, and suicides. Every Girl's Magazine is following a line which very few girls of from eight to sixteen will appreciate. It is, in fact, hardly so much a girl's magazine as a magazine of general reading for the household, and it goes out of its way to announce its secularist aims. Perfectly healthy in tone and subject matter though. it is, it cannot be compared with the Girls' Own Paper for popularity. The latter was started in 1880, and in 1884 was said to have attained 'a circulation equalled by no other English illustrated magazine published in this country.' Whether this is so or not, however, it has undoubtedly met with a success of which editor and proprietors alike have equal reason to be proud. Its good work is unbounded. Probably the best feature of the paper is its prize competitionsThese are made the medium of much charity. For instance, in 1885, 700 mufflers and 1,224 pairs of cuffs sent in in competition were presented to occupants of London workhouses, after the prizes had been awarded. Again, at the suggestion of the Countess of Aberdeen, the subscribers to the Girls' Own raised among themselves 1,000l. towards establishing a 'Girls' Own Home' for the benefit of underpaid

1

London girls of the working classes. The popularity of these competitions is illustrated by the fact that 4,956 girls took part in endeavouring to secure a prize for the best Biographical Table of famous women. One sack crammed full of these required five men to carry it upstairs. The tables came from all parts of the world; from Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, Gibraltar, India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Canada, Jamaica, Turkey in Asia, Antigua, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chili, Cape Verde Islands, Madeira, and other far corners of the earth. One lady, we are told, was so enthusiastic as to send the table across the seas enclosed as a letter at the cost of thirty shillings. The Girls' Own numbers among its contributors many famous ladies and gentlemen, and its great merit is that it does not depend wholly on fiction for its success, but gives interesting articles on all kinds of household matters.

and the bad

Having indicated the general characteristics of the literature which is published exclusively for girls, let us now glance at its tendency. This is undoubtedly sad, and is the only feature of the great majority of girls' books to which real objection can be taken. It is probably the result of an attempt to avoid the absurdities of extremes. For a long time the custom was, in writing for the young, to make virtue triumphant in the end. Such a view of the relations of life is recognised by the most careless observer to be false. Virtue, far more frequently than otherwise, is found prostrate and helpless at the feet of vice. Virtue may bring its own reward; it may even have proved itself impervious to the onslaughts of the enemy, but it is the exception rather than the rule that honesty and uprightness of purpose should overthrow meanness and wickedness. The struggle between the two sides of human character-the good - has been coextensive with the existence of the world in the past, and will in some phase or other be coextensive with the future. Civilisation, with all the blessings which it brings in its train, is environed by new and undreamed-of blemishes. But it is the duty of man to recognise the evils which are part of the most virtuous systems, to battle against them, and to be able in the end to show a roll of courage and steadfastness in the cause of right, no matter whether his struggle has brought him victory or not. If he cannot wipe evil off the face of the earth, he can at least prevent evil from being reinforced. If those ladies who, with every good intention, take up pens to write for our girls, would lay before them some such code as this, they would vary considerably their method of treating ethics. As it is, the teaching which comes of girls' books practically amounts to this. If you are wicked you must reform, and when you have reformed you will die! Good young people are not allowed to see many years of life. It is an

1 Report, R.T.S., 1884.

uncompromisingly severe rendering of the classic axiom 'whom the gods love die young.' I cannot indicate what I mean better than by reference to a story which every one knows, The Old Curiosity Shop. Why did Little Nell die? If she was too good for the world, why was she ever brought into it; if she was not, why, in the midst of the sin, the misery, the suffering of mankind, were her sunny presence and beneficent influence removed so soon? This question might be asked with tenfold force of half the works written for girls. Mrs. Marshall in Court and Cottage introduces us to a young lady who is wilfully disobedient and disrespectful to her elders. Her headstrong nature gets her into trouble, and she then becomes a good girl; merely to die. So in the case of Miss Doudney's Marion's Three Crowns. Marion's conceit is her great sin. When she is brought to a proper sense of her position, she nobly nurses a step-sister ill with small-pox, catches the disease herself, recovers life only to find her face robbed of its beauty, and is through this deprivation deserted by the man she loves. Finally, she rushes into the heart of the cholera-affected districts of London, doing noble work, and reaping love and blessings on all sides. Her reward is to fall a victim to the dread epidemic. Why, again, was Lady Blanche not allowed to live in Miss Sewell's work, The Earl's Daughter?

Seeing for whom Mrs. Marshall, Miss Doudney, and Miss Sewell are writing, it is not enough for me to know that the deaths of these heroines constitute the finest passages in their books, just as the death of Little Nell is one of the finest pieces of writing in all Dickens's works. Such stories are, it seems to me, likely to make our keen-witted daughters say, 'Where is the use of my living virtuously, if virtue's reward is speedy removal from the presence of the friends I love?' Virtue triumphant, wide of living facts though it may be, is better than this. Let it be distinctly understood that I give books written especially for girls credit for many excellent qualities. I simply wish now to indicate a direction in which I fear they slightly overdo their good intentions. Neither must what I say in this connection be accepted by those who object altogether to any kind of special literature for the young' between the ages of ten and sixteen, as an additional argument in their favour. Girls' literature as a whole shows few signs of a disposition to write down. to the reader. If this were so, no condemnation of it could be too strong. Girls' literature performs one very useful function. It enables girls to read something above mere baby tales, and yet keeps them from the influence of novels of a sort which should be read only by persons capable of forming a discreet udgment. It is a long jump from Esop to Ouida,' and to place Miss Sarah Doudney or Miss Anne Beale between Æsop and Ouida' may at least prevent a disastrous moral fall. It is just as appropriate and necessary that girls should read books suitable to their age as that they should

wear suitable dresses. The chief end served by 'girls' literature' is that, whilst it advances beyond the nursery, it stops short of the full blaze of the drawing-room.

As with boys' literature, so with girls'. That which the workingclass lads read is generally of the lowest and most vicious character: that which their sisters read is in no way superior. The boy takes in the penny dreadful; the girl secures the penny novelette, which is equally deserving of the adjective. Because the influence of these love and murder concoctions among girls is not so apparent to the public eye as the influence of the burglar and bushranging fiction among boys, it must not be supposed that that influence is less real. It is, in fact, in many ways not only more real, but more painful. Boys may be driven to sea or to break into houses by the stories they read; their actions are at once recorded in the columns of the daily papers. With girls the injury is more invidious and subtle. It is almost exclusively domestic. We do not often see an account of a girl committing any very serious fault through her reading. But let us go into the houses of the poor, and try to discover what is the effect on the maiden mind of the trash which maidens buy. If we were to trace the matter to its source, we should probably find that the high-flown conceits and pretensions of the poorer girls of the period, their dislike of manual work and love of freedom, spring largely from notions imbibed in the course of a perusal of their penny fictions. Their conduct towards their friends, their parents, their husbands, their employers, is coloured by what they then gather. They obtain distorted views of life, and the bad influence of these works on themselves is handed down to their children and scattered broadcast throughout the family. Where all is so decidedly unwholesome it is unnecessary to mention names. With the exception of the Girls' Own Paper and Every Girl's Magazine, which are not largely purchased by working-class girls, there is hardly a magazine read by them which it would not be a moral benefit to have swept off the face of the earth. It would be well for philanthropists to bear this fact in mind. There is a wide and splendid field for the display of a humanising and elevating literature among girls. Such a literature ought not to be beyond our reach. Girls can hardly be much blamed for reading the hideous nonsense they do, when so little that is interesting and stirring in plot, and bright and suggestive in character, is to be had.

Girls do not, however, by any means confine their reading to the books and magazines published specially for them. They read of course thousands of standard works every year. But that so-called

'girls' books' continue to be published in shoals annually is sufficient proof that there is a market for them. They are, however, probably read chiefly by the younger girls. Girls well advanced in their teens do not largely affect the class of writers to which Miss Beale and Miss

Doudney belong. American works are greatly in favour, and one of the best girl-stories I have read is Mr. T. B. Aldrich's Prudence Palfrey, full of incident and good situations as it is. The Wide, Wide World and Queechy give place to no books in the English language for popularity among girls old and young. Mrs. Wetherell knew how to write stories true in every particular to nature, and to pourtray character at once real and ideal. Fleda in Queechy is second only, if she is not equal, as a literary study, to Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Whilst both Fleda and Nell are so ideal in their perfect beauty of character that one is conscious such veritable sprites could hardly be found in the every-day world which we know, one is also assured that their existence is not impossible. Fleda indicates what is practicable in women, and, though the linking of her fortune with Carleton's was a happy stroke which has probably done much to make the work a household possession in England, the connection affords an excellent example of the power for good which noble women have over the minds of those whose sympathy they touch. Miss Jessie Fothergill's First Violin, Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, and Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, are three works to which the girls of England are much attached. East Lynne, in my humble judgment, ought to be placed in every girl's hands as soon as she has arrived at an age when she may find that life has for her unsuspected dangers. The work teaches many lessons valuable to young ladies, especially those of a jealous or impulsive disposition. Girls are, of course, among the chief supporters of the lending library, and eagerly rush after what Mr. Ruskin would call 'every fresh addition to the fountain of folly,' in the shape of three-volume novels. Another phase of their reading is in the direction of boys' books. There are few girls who boast brothers who do not insist on reading every work of Ballantyne's or Kingston's or Henty's which may be brought into the house. The Boys' Own Paper is studied by thousands of girls. The explanation is that they can get in boys' books what they cannot get in the majority of their own-a stirring plot and lively movement. Probably nearly as many girls as boys have read Robinson Crusoe, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Sandford and Merton, and other long-lived 'boys' stories. Nor is this liking for heroes rather than heroines to be deprecated. It ought to impart vigour and breadth to a girl's nature, and to give sisters a sympathetic knowledge of the scenes wherein their brothers live and work. One lady writes to me: • When I was younger, I always preferred Jules Verne and Ballantyne, and Little Women and Good Wives, to any other books, except those of Charles Lever.'

It seems to be a habit of the times that any one who undertakes to say anything about any particular branch of literature should append a list of the best books in that class. To indicate a course of reading for men and women is difficult; to indicate such a course for