Harper's Weekly. The New Timothy, Carter Quarterman, A Year Worth Living, Col. Dunwoddie, all showed power in delineating out-ofthe-way types of character. Blessed Saint Certainty presents a spirited portrait of Governor Sam Houston.

The slavery agitation, the Civil War, and the vexed questions of reconstruction and negro suffrage, furnished themes for novels which seem to have gained a permanent place in literature. First in the list, of course, is Uncle Tom's Cabin. Hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold in this country, and it has been read, and many times translated, abroad. Its author, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, and had shown literary skill in her treatment of New England historical topics before Uncle Tom made her famous. She wrote this great story for the National Era, a Washington newspaper, and afterwards (1852) republished it in two volumes. Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) did not equal the popularity of its predecessor. Her later stories were studies of New England character, or of the romance of modern life. The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878) best typify her literary merits.

The charm of her novels lies in their knowledge of certain types of New England character, and in an exquisite sense of humor that stops just short of the grotesque. The race of shrewd New England villagers, of quaint family servitors, of angular, energetic old maids, of illogical and warm-hearted grandmothers, of sweet, conscientious, introspective maidens, found in her an appreciative observer and a faithful limner.

Self-consciousness is the attribute of youth, in nations as in It was fostered in the Americans from early

individuals.

stages, by their struggle for political independence; and it was not lessened by the caustic tone of the literary and social criticism launched at them from the mother country. Even while resenting the unfair generalizations of Mrs. Trollope and Charles Dickens, our more acute thinkers busied themselves with noting the peculiarities which might have occasioned the sneers. The unique conditions of life in many parts of our vast territory, the impact under diverse conditions of many foreign elements against the Anglo-Saxon nucleus, the foreign life nesting and perpetuating itself in our great cities, all have been prolific in suggestion to the literary artist.

Some remarkable sketches of New England life were made by Elizabeth D. B. Stoddard (born 1823), the wife of the poet, R. H. Stoddard. In The Morgesons (1862), Two Men (1865), Temple House (1867), she has treated with dramatic vigor the repressed, yet ardent passion, the intellectual courage, the material limitations, and the curious social distinctions of New England life. In spirit, though not in chronology, she should be counted a writer of the modern school.

The broad, easy-going style in which Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Stowe depicted certain conspicuous New England types has given place to an elaborate method of realistic detail. Critics have given Mary E. Wilkins (born about 1857) enthusiastic, even extravagant praise, for her minute delineations of New England character and motive. Two volumes of short stories, A Humble Romance (1887), A New England Nun, and three novels, Pembroke (1894), Jane Field, and Madelon are pen-and-ink studies of unusual power. Her groups consist of few persons, her plots are simple, and her action slight, but the whole scene is often animated by passion the most intense, emotion the most subtle. Miss Wilkins has been the Jane Austen of the lonely households and sequestered communities of her native New England; but she lacks the genial humanity of her English prototype. There is more than a tinge of morbid feeling in her most ambitious productions. She frequently stirs the humorous appreciation of her readers; she seldom or never gives way to her own. In this she is distinguished from Sarah Orne Jewett (born 1849), whose pictures are more genial, while her range is narrower, and her literary art less elaborate. Deep

haven (1877), The Mate of the Daylight, A Country Doctor, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and many later writings, are enjoyed as much as they are admired.

Maria Louisa Pool (1845) in Sketches from Ransome, Mass., Roweny in Boston, and similar stories, has depicted with skillful touch some grotesque oddities of New England character, while working out interesting sociological problems. That she does not limit herself by local coloring is shown by later novels. Out of Step, Against Human Nature, and The Two Salomes, are noteworthy instances of her peculiar style.

Sally Pratt McLean in Cape Cod Folks and Vesty of the Basins is often crude and careless, but preserves interesting specimens of provincial fashions, soon to pass away before the railway and the free public school. The graceful short stories of Rose Terry Cooke, Lucy Larcom, and Alice Brown are less individualized efforts in the same tempting field, and many others might be cited. Indeed, New England remains the favorite, as it has long been the familiar, field for the genre painters of fiction. But other localities now have their chroniclers, conscientious and often original in method.

Before the Civil War, the people of the Southern States contributed social and oratorical, rather than literary, elements to the resources of the nation. This was manifest not only in the limited amount of their writing, but in the evanescent popularity which it attained. A wide difference of standard separates the best writing of Edgar Allan Poe from the most admired novels of William Gilmore Simms and John Esten Cooke. Even in annals and memoirs, Southerners attempted but little; and for the historians and novelists who would perpetuate the antebellum life of South Carolina and Georgia, of Alabama and Tennessee, rich mines remain unworked. The financial straits following the war led Southerners naturally to literature as a means of livelihood; the proud selfconsciousness induced by sectional patriotism was stimulated by the curiosity of the Northerner, to express itself

in the pages of journal and magazine. All conspired with the more energetic mental habits of the younger generation in the "New South" to increase literary production. As the observant Northerner, commenting on the hospitalities and extravagance, the crudities and disproportions of the old régime, had sketched the South from the outside, so within the past quarter-century her own affectionate children have portrayed in novel, tale, and poem the most piquant aspects of her semi-patriarchal society, the pathos of her sacrifices for the lost cause, the desolation of her proud poverty, the nobility of her heroic women.

Only a few writers can receive the individual mention which many well deserve. An entire volume might be devoted to the dialect literature which has fed the modern appetite for realism, while reproducing the patois of the several States. The quaint cities of Alexandria and New Orleans have furnished backgrounds for innumerable fascinating character-studies; while the picturesque mountains of the Blue Ridge bid fair to become a storied region as truly as the Black Forest.

George W. Cable was born (1844) in New Orleans, and experienced, as he has portrayed, many of the darker phases of Southern life. Leaving school at fourteen to be the only support of his family, he later enlisted in the Confederate army, was seriously wounded, and began life over again after the war, as an errand boy in New Orleans. His first literary efforts appeared in a special column of the New Orleans Picayune, over the signature "Drop-shot." After a brief editorial connection with the paper, he returned to mercantile life, writing only in the intervals of business, until the success of the sketches entitled Old Creole Days, justified him in adopting literature as a profession. The Grandissimes, Madame Delphine, Dr. Sevier, Bonaventure, are stories of Creole life and character which are without rivals, as they

were without precedent. Cable has published other works; The Creoles of Louisiana, Strange True Stories of Louisiana, The Silent South, and a history of New Orleans display the same minute investigation which marked his studies of curious customs and difficult patois. He has been deeply interested in the negro problem and the social regeneration of the South. He has written and lectured much thereupon, especially since his removal to the North. Of late years he has found a congenial home at Northampton, Massachusetts.

The fact that Cable is a man of deep, positive religious convictions, holding simple, even stern views of life, does not surprise those who have felt the undercurrent of purpose in the humor and pathos of his elaborate literary studies. Tenderness and strenuousness in the handling of many social topics betray the moralist; and the people of Louisiana have protested clamorously against much of his literary interpretation of their life. It must be said, however, that they have not been able to strengthen their special pleading by satisfactory counterproofs. Mr. Cable's literary impressions, like his economic theories, have grown out of careful study of history, verified by keen personal observation. His variance from the feeling of his compatriots from the first marked him as the son of the New South; one of the most critical, because one of the most patriotic children of his native State. There is certainly no conflict of testimony between his pictures and the pathetic Balcony Stories of Grace Elizabeth King, one of the younger generation of Southern writers, and the daughter of a prominent lawyer of New Orleans. Her sketches began to appear in 1886-1888; and the interest won by Bonne Maman, Monsieur Motte, and Earthlings by no means abates as she develops her resources. Miss King seems the true and dignified chronicler of a decaying aristocracy, noble even amid its ruins.

Essentially different in attitude from Cable, and more in harmony with the enthusiastic loyalty of his own people, is Thomas Nelson Page (born 1853). No Southerner has done more than he to bring out the picturesque, romantic effects, naturally attending the breaking-up of the patriarchal order of life in the Old Dominion. The tragic desolation of civil