With respect to her writings, nothing is more impossible than to gauge correctly the amount of comparative good worked in any age, by different books or different styles of composition. That which makes the most stir, that which has the greatest apparent success, is by no means always the most wide in its influence. Some of us may be inclined to think that A. L. O. E. might have reached a larger circle, might have gained a more extensive influence, if she had less anxiously pressed so very much didactic talk into her tales,--if too she had more studiously cultivated her own dramatic instincts, and had more closely studied human nature. All this we are quite at liberty to believe. For the question as to ‘doing good’ through a book does not rest upon the amount of religious teaching which may be packed into a given number of printed pages, but rather upon the force with which a certain lesson is presented, with or without many words. There is no especial power in an abundance of words; rather the reverse!