mpered Sardanapalus of Versailles," and of "the silken
favourites' calculated adultery," we are conscious that he has learnt
whatever lesson Gibbon has to teach. In other words, he, too, is
obedient to the imperious voice of convention. And the novelists follow
the same path as the historians. Mr Henry James, in his patient analysis
of human character, has evoked such subtle harmonies as our English
speech has not known before. Mr Howells, even when he finds his material
in the land of his birth, shows himself the master of a classic style,
exquisite in balance and perfect in tone. And both share the common
inheritance of our tongue, are links in the central chain of our
tradition, and in speech, if not in thought, are sternly conservative.

This, then, is an irony of America, that the country which has a natural
dislike of the past still dances to the ancient measures, that the
country which has invented so much has not invented a new method of
expression, that the country which questions all things accepts its
literature in simple faith. The advantages of conformity are obvious.
Tradition is nine-tenths of all the arts, and the writers of America
have escaped the ruin which overtakes the bold adventurer who stakes
his all upon first principles. But sometimes we miss the one-tenth that
might be added. How much is there in the vast continent which might be
translated into words! And how little has achieved a separate, living
utterance! Mr Stedman has edited an American Anthology, a stout volume
of some eight hundred pages, whose most obvious quality is a certain
technical accomplishment. The unnumbered bards of America compose their
verses with a diffident neatness, which recalls the Latin style
of classical scholars. The workmanship is deft, the inspiration is
literary. If many of the authors' names were transposed small injustice
would be done them. The most of the work might have been written
anywhere and under any conditions. Neither sentiment nor local colour
suggests the prairie or the camp.

It is the intervention of dialect which alone confers a distinctive
character upon American verse. Wisely is Mr Stedman's collection
called an Anthology. It has something of the same ingenuity, the same
impersonality, which marks the famous Anthology of the Greeks; it
illustrates the temper not of a young but of an old people.

How shall we surprise in her literature the true spirit of America?
Surely not in Walt Whitman, w