By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.

It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.

Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.