We dabble much in literature; our effusions are accepted and refused by the college papers, refused and accepted by the magazines and comic papers, from the "Atlantic Monthly" to "Tid Bits", but to almost every litterateur, his aim is to write something acceptable for the moment; to grapple earnestly with literature never occurs to him. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and we would recommend to every nascent Victor Hugo - we are all such, of course - that instead of choosing topics that are easy to treat and hard to criticise - "Moonrise at Sea", "The Character of the Biography of Y", or "The Affair of No. 13 Rue Ghenna" - he should exercise his powers upon subjects less seductive, and harder to treat, perhaps, but affording greater opportunities for criticism, and less facility for masking bad work. It is easy to make a bad story about Antipodeans pass muster, whereas a faulty account of things nearer home stands abjectly and manifestly futile.

Such work as the skits that appeared in the last "Advocate" under the heading, "Talks with the Ancients", is an exception here, and should not be so, for it affords no opportunity of hiding flaws and exercises healthily the powers of insight and imagination; whereas descriptions of moonlight and murders, such as our immaturity writes them, are morbid in all their tendencies. We cannot, of course, all be Thackerays, and "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," with the Muses as with less ethereal petticoats. But a vapid dalliance with literature is demoralizing in the last degree.