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The crash will come again, if the novelists do not take care. The same silly piping of the loves of the drawing-room, the same obsequious attitude towards a supposititious public clamouring for the commonplace, inspire the majority of the novel-writers of to-day. Happily, we have, what our fathers in 1835 had not, half a dozen careful and vigorous men of letters who write, not what the foolish publishers ask for, but what they themselves choose to give. The future rests with these few recognised masters of fiction, and with their successors, the vigorous younger men who are preparing to take their place. What are these novelists going to do? They were set down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate called Life, and because one corner of it—the two or three acres hedged about, and called the kitchen-garden of Love—offered peculiar attractions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have neglected the other ninety-seven acres. The result is that by over-pressing their garden, and forcing crop after crop out of it, it is well-nigh exhausted, and will soon refuse to respond to the incessant hoe and spade; while, all the time, the rest of the estate, rich and almost virgin soil, is left to cover itself with the weeds of newspaper police-reports.