ance. Not only to the meagre, rigid and self-repressive lives of these village Calvinists, but as well to their earnest purposes, their loyal consecration to duty and their genuine reverence for the home, the church and the state, Miss Wilkins is just. Her studies-stories they can hardly be called— are perhaps works of science rather than works of art, but in either case, they are literature.

That cosmopolitan New York should furnish material for the same scientific study in provincialism would seem to involve a contradiction in terms. Yet

that city has an individuality of its own, difficult as it is to depict. Mr. Janvier has done something for its art studios and its French colonies. Mr. Howells, in his "Hazard of New Fortunes," has done something for its streets and houses, but it is to Mr. Hamlin Garland and to Mr. Richard Harding Davis that we are indebted for the introduction of typical New Yorkers to American readers. Bach, in his different view, gives a hint of the literary possibilities to be found in what has heretofore seemed commonplace New York. In Mr. Eugene Field's grotesque commingling of New England reminiscence, the love of exaggeration to be found all over the western plains, and the quips of

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humor and turns of tenderness which are closely associated with the Pacific coast, we find writing appropriate to Chicago, while further west, Arkansas finds utterance in the sympathetic studies of Octave Thanet. The early mining excitement of the Californian coast had its own peculiar literature in the racy sketches of Bret Harte-a skillful pupil of Dickens in his mingled humor and pathos, grotesqueness and idealism, and in his depiction of acts of gentleness in lives of hardship. His pictures of mining-life, however, have in them an originality which makes him something more than a mere pupil. He has made a distinct, though a provincial contribution to letters.

Outside of these sketches there is little genuine humor in American literature. We have many writers of extravagant burlesque ; we have in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes a kindly, brilliant, scintillating, suggestive wit; but we can find nowhere in American letters that delicate and quizzical self-revelation, that pathetic oddness, those fantastically expressed confidences, those self-amused idiosyncracies which constitute humor and which flavored the conversations of Abraham Lincoln. There is a reserve in American writers which prevents such humor. To find it we must go to the English Charles Lamb, Thomas Fuller, and Sir Thomas Browne. Few nations, however, have produced any wittier books than Dr. Holmes' Breakfast Table Series, or more laughable extravagances than Mark Twain's, while more quiet and more graceful, though less original than either, are the shorter sketches of Charles Dudley Warner and "Ike Marvel."

Scientific observation and poetic insight united in Thoreau to give him a familiar acquaintance with the shy beauties of nature. His writings are marred by infelicities and affectations in expression, but they are the work of a genuine lover and interpreter of the woods and streams. He is the master in a school which includes an increasing number of writers every decade.

At least those American historians, Prescott, Parkman, and Motley, have gained a transatlantic reputation for the eloquence of their style, the beauty of their description, and the artistic power of their presentations of historic movements. All three were careful scholars, though idealists, vigorous, and clear writers, and sanguine Americans. To those at all seriously inclined their histories are as absorbing as fiction, and, if too enthusiastic to be accurate in all their details, are unquestionably true in general outline. They have made use of the imagination as an aid to scholarship, not as a substitute for it, and they have used it chiefly, if not solely, to elucidate truth.

There is nothing in oratory more profoundly eloquent than the two addresses of Abraham Lincoln on the field of Gettysburg. They are the simple and devout expressions of a national patriotism, purged of all worldly passion. The chasteness, the harmony, the marvelous beauty of their language is, however, forgotten in the sublimer beauty of their thought and spirit. They are so sacred

to something higher than literature that we never think of them as literature. The clear and animating orations of the chivalric, visionary Wendell Phillips deserve a passing mention for their beauty of form and transparency of argument. But our one great orator is the Whig statesman, Daniel Webster. He was educated in New Hampshire, under that vigorous discipline which only the hardships of poverty can give, and showed the value of his training in the stalwartness of his after-life, when he stood for a conscientious adherence to the

Union and to the Constitution liberally interpreted. To this day, his sonorous, significant, and impressive utterances must be studied for any thorough appreciation of the responsibilities of American citizenship and the genius of American institutions. By his inherent dignity he long maintained against the encroachments of the modern politician our forefathers' standard of dignity in American public life. Unquestionably the inferior of the great English statesman, Edmund Burke, in beauties of imagination, precision and incisiveness of language, and in profundity of statesmanship, he was at least more smooth, more even, and more selfcontrolled.

The contrast between the two well illustrates the contrast between England and America in every department of literature. The typical English writer shows the greater mastery of the powers and striking beauties of language. The American is the smoother and the more polished. The English is the more intense, and the more self-expressive, and the more powerful; the American the more guarded and the more contented. America has produced as yet no literature comparable to the greater classics of England, but she has produced much worthy to be found in every Anglo-Saxon household, and capable of cheering and strengthening in his work and hardships every Anglo-Saxon reader.

FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS.

WASHINGTON IRVING,

AUTHOR OF THE "SKETCH BOOK."

IRVING, one of the first authors to make a real American literature, was born in New York in 1783. In consequence of delicate health he spent much of his youth in European travel. In 1809 he published his famous "Knickerbocker's History of New York," which had great success. But it is by his "Sketch Book," published in 1819, that he will be longest remembered. Rip Van Winkle and his twenty years' sleep, the amorous schoolmaster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, are characters which live forever immortal. This book, although published in America, was written in England, where Irving was then living, enjoying the pleasures of intimate friendship with Sir Walter Scott, Campbell, and the most famous English writers of the time. Sydney Smith's famous taunt, "Who reads an American book?" lost its truth and its sting after the "Sketch Book" came from America to charm and captivate the reading world of England. John Murray, the famous English publisher, paid Irving large sums for that book and for "Bracebridge Hall" and the "Tales of a Traveler," which followed it. There is a story that while Irving was at the height of his popularity in England, two women were overheard in conversation before a bust of Washington in an art gallery. "Who was Washington, mother?" asked the younger. Why, my dear,

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don't you know?" was the reproving reply; "he wrote the 'Sketch Book.' In 1826 Irving went to Spain, occupying for some time a suite of rooms in the

famous old Moorish palace of the Alhambra. While there he wrote his "Life of Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and the "Alhambra" tales, all of which had great success. In 1832 he returned to America, and settled at his country seat, "Sunnyside," on the Hudson, near Tarrytown. This lovely home

when surrounded by appreciative and responsive friends. In 1842, at the suggestion of Daniel Webster, he was appointed by President Tyler minister to Spain, where he spent four years, returning in 1846 to his beloved Sunnyside, where he lived until his death in November, 1859.