two countries, then please God I will. The laugh dies out as we get old, you see, but the love and the truth don't, praised be God! and I begin to think of the responsibilities of this here pen now writing to you with a feeling of no small awe. The first name I heard in the railroad going hence to New York was my own by a pretty child selling books. So, here it is after fifteen years, think I, here's the fame they talk about. My impression, though, was one of awe and humility rather than exultation, and to pray

God I might keep honest and tell truth always."

And so, instead of a stereotyped record of travel, Thackeray gave us that delightful book The Virginians, in part the result of his visit, and wrote for use on a second lecture tour in America his illuminating lectures on the four Georges. This second tour, begun in the fall of 1855, was also a prosperous one, and, though often ill, the lecturer was happy, and wrote home cheery letters, some of which have lately been given to the world

by his daughter. Wherever he went he was again received with the utmost kindness, and great was his delight when told by Dr. Kane, just returned from the icy North, that he had seen one of his seamen in one of the holds crouched over a book for hours and hours, and behold it was Pendennis. One amusing adventure quoted by Mrs. Ritchie recalls Mr. Pickwick's most terrifying experience. "Had a very pleasant dinner with S. Ward and a party at Delmonico's,' wrote the novelist.

"Came home late and had an awful Escape-I tremble when I think of it. Took my key at the bar, entered my apartment, began straightway to pull off my boots, etc., etc., when a sweet female voice from the room within exclaimed 'George!' I had gone into the second-floor room instead of the third. I gathered my raiment together and dashed out of the premises."

Two years after Thackeray's second visit Charles Mackay, the Scotch song writer, prosecuted a lengthy lecture tour in the United States, and upon his return home published an optimistic volume entitled Life and Liberty in the United States. A decade or more before Alexander Mackay, another Scotsman and author, but no kin of the poet, had visited the States to report for the London Chronicle the debates in Congress upon the Oregon question, later publishing The Western World; or, Travels Through the United States in 1846-47. a work of comprehensive scope and signal breadth of vision.

Rufus Rockwell Wilson.

There is among the writings of Carlyle a passage sufficing to atone for many warped and narrow sayings of the English prophet—a few words, ringing clearly with the sound of truth, that epitomise a deep and lofty theory. "In this world," we find it written in Past and Present, "there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men." The veneration done to Human Worth-herein lies the greatest charm of Mr. Howells's reminiscences. From the boyhood days when first he met Bayard Taylor, to the later years when Longfellow and Lowell and those others whom Mr. Howells most loved and revered went forth to join the undying dead, the record of his friendships is a record of devotion to what is most lovable in human personality and what is most admirable in human character. And if, indeed, Mr. Howells seems at times to have worshipped with a little too much modesty. the great authors whom he met, so difficult of determination is the right line between self-suppression and self-assertion that one hesitates to do more than call attention to this trait of Mr. Howells -a trait that is individual rather than typically American.

The nobly inspired humility which forty years ago characterised Mr. Howells's attitude toward the famous writers of New England is easily understood in remembering Mr. Howells's own viction, never since abandoned, that authorship is the noblest of callings; in reflecting on the beautiful characters of the men who were making New England great; and, above all, in recalling the status of our literature and the high purposes which it subserved two-score years ago. The men who wrote in those days were deeply imbued with a sense of the sacredness of their profession, and were poets-"makers,""shapers," as the Greek word means, not alone of phrases that should ring musically in the ears of the hearers, but also, to an important extent, makers of a nation's conscience and

*Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship. By W. D. Howells. Illustrated. Harper and Brothers. 1900. $2.50.

shapers of a nation's culture. Emerson held high the torch of personal independence and of universal brotherhood; Longfellow played with so much moral sweetness on the various chords of life that the workmen of England stopped to listen; Hawthorne enticed the spirit of beauty into his thoughtful pages and by the magic of his art there held her captive; Holmes had already taken his place at the Breakfast Table, where, from his autocrat's chair, he gave to all who came pellets of wisdom and of experienced knowledge made palatable and delicious by means of their coating of simple humour and smiling grace; Lowell was widely known not alone as the satiric writer of The Biglow Papers and The Fable for Critics, but, too, as the tender moralist of The Vision of Sir Launfal and the inspiring teacher of literature and life; while Whittier, the embodied flame of the spirit of Emancipation, had in his Voices of Freedom sounded a note whose echoes thrilled through the land and could not be stilled till the slaves were free. It is not necessary here to argue the question of the interdependence of art and morality; to show either the fallacy of Mr. Swinburne's contention that the greatest art may be wholly disassociated from the ethical or critical faculty; or, on the other hand, to dwell on the inevitable limitations that are the result of didacticism. What remains true in any case is the noble simplicity, the high-minded unselfishness and the powerful influence of the New England group under whose spell Mr. Howells came as a young man of twenty-two or three.

It is not primarily as a critic of literature that Mr. Howells recalls his acquaintanceships, but as a man among men; and thus instead of studied appreciations of poems and essays, we get those personal glimpses, those intimate impressions, which are deeply welcome. because they illuminate the great bond of our common humanity which makes Lincoln and Emerson and the workman in the factory and the ploughman in the field brothers in blood. It was Mr. Howells's rare good fortune to be invited only a few days after his arrival in Boston as the fourth at a dinner where sat Lowell and Holmes and with them Fields,

a Mæcenas among American publishers. Here the young Ohioan first listened not only to candid authoritative discussion of literary doings and doers, but also watched the sparkling flow of cultured thought into many of the commoner channels of life's activity. "It is best to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and amuse them even more." And so Mr. Howells recalls the saying of Lowell's, "which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, 'Remember the dinner-bell.'"

The sunlight natures of the three men with whom Mr. Howells dined at the Parker House make all the more interesting by contrast the shadowy character of Hawthorne, into whose presence a note of introduction from Lowell soon made it possible for Mr. Howells to enter. Holmes had already smilingly told him that Hawthorne was "like a dim room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantle." But Mr. Howells, with the insight that reverence and sympathy give to all eyes, seems to have pierced the obscuring gloom and recognised the purity and the light of the mystic flame. Hawthorne's look was "sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and, therefore, sorrowfully with the problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded him." The talk was of Europe and of America, and Hawthorne asked questions concerning the West, and he spoke of the New England temperament—all fitfully and with a "visible shyness;" yet, in spite of the fact that there was "a great deal of silence in it all," Mr. Howells writes that "my memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life." In honouring Hawthorne, Mr. Howells does honour to himself, and no one who has read the letters wherein our most beautifully imaginative writer has shown his thoughts and feelings can fail to take an almost personal pleasure in the delicate tribute that the adjective "finest" so well accen

tuates.

The day after meeting Hawthorne, Mr. Howells called on Thoreau, who stands forth prominently in these remi

tor.

niscences by reason of being the one man who did not fulfil the expectations that his fame had aroused in his young visiNor, indeed, in reading Walden, which contains all that there is of Thoreau's philosophy, need one marvel at its author's impotency to inspire sympathy and affection in the heart of youth. A battle is not won by him who runs away; the enigma of life is not solved by him who avoids the world of men; and though in the sincerity of Thoreau's advocacy of simple, unostentatious living there is to be found a salutary influence, the absence of his sense of human kinship makes of him a figure in American letters even more solitary than Poe. Mr. Howells went to him revering the defender of John Brown; he left realising that the John Brown who had called forth Thoreau's support "was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to cherish and to nourish ourselves upon.

Reassuring it must have been for Mr. Howells when, but a few days after this dampening interview, he met Emerson, and in noticing the "strange charm" in the scer's eyes, "which I felt then and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but sweeter and less sad," to realise that plain living and high thinking were not, Thoreau-like, dependent on self-exclusion from man's society, but, indeed, Emerson-like, most assured when both action and thought should take into account the conditions of all human life. There is a far-reaching significance in Mr. Howells's statement that "if the truth were told, Emerson was more to my young fervour, because he had said that John Brown had made the gallows glorious, like the cross, than because he had uttered all those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be leading the thought of the world." Had Emerson not been willing and eager to take part in the actual strife that humanity was then waging, he would not have been the man capable of inspiring after ages through the earnestness of his lofty teachings.

Mr. Howells's first interview with Emerson is interesting to the reader

chiefly in its evidence of how deficient our great critic of life was as a critic of literature. The Marble Faun Emerson called "mere mush," while for Poe he had only the contemptuous phrase "the jingle man." This was more than ten years after Poe's death, and Emerson must long ago have forgiven, if he had ever noticed, Poe's sneering treatment of him as a transcendentalist. In later years, when Mr. Howells was editing the Atlantic Monthly (and it was, of course, as a result of his connection with this most important journal in our literary history that Mr. Howells came to know most of the eminent New Englanders well), he met Emerson at rare intervals, but never became intimate with him. The last time he saw him was at the burial of Longfellow, when Emerson, an old man of eighty, "went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: 'The gentleman we have just been burying,' he said, 'was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name." "

In the chapter wherein this incident is related Mr. Howells has many anecdotes to tell in connection with the Dante Club, which originally met at Longfellow's house. Here Lowell and Fields and Holmes and Agassiz and Norton and Howells (lovers of Italy all), and at times Appleton, Longfellow's brother-in-law. and Greene, a gentle old friend, would meet to hear and discuss the translation of the Commedia and to exchange thoughts, as at the Saturday Club in Boston, light and serious under the poet's hospitable roof. Mr. Howells exposes the more personal sides of Longfellow's character, and we see him the patient, conscientious gentleman and scholar, not capable of the entire intimacies of some natures, but interested rather in "the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side, and involved characters rather than individu

als." Though this trait led to a certain reticence, Longfellow had a feeling of kindness for all men, a universal benevolence, which laid him open to criticism from sterner judges of human error, but which (so far removed was Longfellow from all mean thought and bitter action) justifies, justifies, in Mr. Howells's opinion, Björnstjerne Björnson's phrase, "The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the white Christ, and Björnson said in his letter, 'Give my love to the white Mr. Longfellow.'

Lowell and Holmes were so much in the public eye that their characters, doubtless, are familiar to many who are not so well acquainted with their writings. But even their familiar figures Mr. Howells illuminates anew. The boyish side of Lowell's nature, the unwillingness with which he parted with his youth, his whimsicalities and yet his deep convictions, his tender love for the young wife who had died so early and his diffidence toward women in general, whom he in many ways revered and still did not wish to meet as intellectual equals, the inspiration of his presence and of his words, the interesting contrast between his catholic tastes, his whole-souled humanity and his "patrician instincts" and "cloistered habits"-all this Mr. Howells summons forth from the dear vista of unforgotten days. And other facts, less known, are here recounted; one, indeed, of peculiar interest for our national history. In 1876 Lowell had been chosen a Presidential elector by the Massachusetts Republicans, "and in that most painful hour when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in for the Presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he should use the original right of the electors under the Constitution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen President over Hayes." Of course, Lowell recognised that quite apart from the question of the justice of Hayes's election he himself had, though a legal, no moral right to vote for Tilden. Yet had he followed, as his personal inclinations might, perhaps, have led him to follow, the letter and not the spirit of the law, our nation's history would in all probability have become bloodier than it is. Such an action, however, seems almost an insult even to