“Compare,” said a friend to me recently, “the relative proportion of kissing and venison pasties in Scott’s novels and Miss Rhoda Broughton’s,”—and I did. It was a lame comparison, owing to my limited acquaintance with part of the given text; but I pursued my investigations cheerfully along the line of Waverley, and was delighted and edified by the result. Years ago, a sulky critic in Blackwood, commenting acrimoniously on Miss Susan Warner’s very popular tales, asserted that there was more kissing in one of these narratives than in all the stories Sir Walter ever wrote. Probably the critic was right. As far as I can recollect Miss Warner’s heroines,—and I knew several of them intimately when a child,—they were always either kissing or crying, and occasionally they did both together. Ellen Montgomery, dissolved in tears because John has forgotten to kiss her good-night, was as cheerless a companion as I{33} ever found in the wide world of story-book life.