nce in both countries, became the mediator between the two great
branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by the power of his
sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise interpreted the two
nations to one another in a subtler but less genial fashion than
Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by bringing
into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have
developed under different institutions. In his novel, _The American_,
1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing
of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as _Daisy Miller_,
1879, the _Pension Beaurepas_, and _A Bundle of Letters_, he has
exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the
aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be
denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth
the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which
result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and
behavior. In _The Europeans_, 1879, and _An International Episode_,
1878, he has reversed the process, bringing Old World standards to the
test of American ideas by transferring his _dramatis personae_ to
republican soil. The last-named of these illustrates how slender a
plot realism requires for its purposes. It is nothing more than the
history of an English girl of good family who marries an American
gentleman and undertakes to live in America, but finds herself so
uncomfortable in strange social conditions that she returns to England
for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine's sister is so taken with
the freedom of these very conditions that she elopes with another
American and "goes West." James is a keen observer of the physiognomy
of cities as well as of men, and his _Portraits of Places_, 1884, is
among the most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign
travel.

Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international" touches. In _A
Foregone Conclusion_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, and others of his
novels, the contrasted points of view in American and European life are
introduced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom,
dialect, etc., which make the modern Englishman and the modern American
such objects of curiosity to each other, and which have been dwelt upon
of late even unto satiety. But in general he finds his subjects at
home, and if he does not know his own countrymen and count