iliar with the wild life of the "moonshiners,"
who distill illicit whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee. These tales are not only exciting in
incident, but strong and fresh in their delineations of character.
Their descriptions of mountain scenery are also impressive, though, in
the case of the last-named writer, frequently too prolonged. George W.
Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans attracted
attention by their freshness and quaintness when published, in the
magazines and re-issued in book form as _Old Creole Days_, in 1879.
His first regular novel, the _Grandissimes_, 1880, was likewise a story
of Creole life. It had the same winning qualities as his short stories
and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic force,
especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of "Bras
Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and
ways in his later books, but the _Grandissimes_ still remains his
masterpiece. All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary
figure of the New South, and the justness and delicacy of his
representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining
agency of the civil war in the States whose "cause" was "lost," but
whose true interests gained even more by the loss than did the
interests of the victorious North.

The four writers last mentioned, have all come to the front within the
past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with the plan of this
sketch, receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our
review of the literary history of the period since the war with a
somewhat more extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work
has done more than any thing else to shape the movement of recent
fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their
writings, though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that
they are analytic in method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a
romancer pure and simple; he wrote the romance of adventure and of
external incident. Hawthorne went much deeper, and with a finer
spiritual insight dealt with the real passions of the heart; and with
men's inner experiences. This he did with truth and power; but,
although himself a keen observer of whatever passed before his eyes, he
was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to the surface facts
of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his characters is
book