But there's a separate chapter for villains.

* * * * *

Let us return to the old novels. What curious pranks time plays with
tastes and vogues. Forty years ago N. P. Willis was just faded. Yet he
was long a great comet of literary glitter and obscured many men of much
greater ability. Everybody read him; the annuals hung upon his name; the
ladies regarded him as a finer and more dashing Byron than Byron.
The place he filled was much like that of Congreve, before whom
Shakespeare's great nose was out of joint for a long time; Congreve, who
was the margarita aluminata major of English poesy and drama and public
life, and is now found in junk stores and in the back line on book
shelves and whom nobody reads now. Willis had his languid affectations,
his superficial cynicism and added to them ostentatious sentimentality.

Does anybody read William Gilmore Simm's elaborate rhetoric disguised as
novels? He must have written two dozen of them, the Richardson of the
United States. Lovers of delicious wit and intellectual humor still
read Dr. Holmes' essays, but it would probably take a physician's
prescription to make them swallow the novels. In what dark corners of
the library are Bayard Taylor's novels and travels hidden? Will you come
into the garden, Maud, and read Chancellor Walworth's mighty tragedies
and Miss Mulock's Swiss-toy historical novels, or will you beg off, like
the honest girl you are, and take a nap? Your sleepiness, dear Miss
Maud, does you credit. By the way, what the deuce is the name of anyone
of these novels? I can recall "Elsie Vernier," by Dr. Holmes and then
there is a blank.