atent nobility of human nature asserted itself in
acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity.
The same men who cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy
curses were capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the
most delicate chivalry. Critics were not wanting who held that, in the
matter of dialect and manners and other details, the narrator was not
true to the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a
more serious question was the doubt whether his characters were
essentially true to human nature; whether the wild soil of revenge and
greed and dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as
blossom in _Tennessee's Partner_ and the _Outcasts of Poker Flat_.
However this may be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a
narrator. His short stories are skillfully constructed and effectively
told. They never drag, and are never overladen with description,
reflection, or other lumber.

In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and
nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little Mexican
maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who
tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at eucher and to rob Injin Dick of
his winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who
settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and
the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold
while digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn,
of Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own,
by holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly
in monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt
in style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in _Jim_, where
a miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old chum, learns that he
is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion when he
recognizes Jim in his informant:

"Well, thar--Good-bye--
No more, sir--I--
Eh?
What's that you say?--
Why, dern it!--sho!--
No? Yea! By Jo!
Sold!
Sold! Why, you limb!
You ornery,
Derned old
Long-legged Jim!"

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry
for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life,
such as gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east
applied his method to other conditions. Of these