r intellectual quality, of Mr. Howells' humour
as compared with Mr. Austin Dobson's. So intensely American in quality
are these scenes from the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Willis Campbell, Mr.
and Mrs. Roberts, and their friends, that it sometimes seems to me
that they might almost be used as touchstones for the advisability of
a visit to the United States. If you can appreciate and enjoy these
farces, go to America by all means; you will have a "good time." If
you cannot, better stay at home, unless your motive is merely one of
base mechanic necessity; you will find the American atmosphere a
little too rare.

A recent phase of Mr. Howells' activity--that, namely, in which, like
Mr. William Morris, he has boldly risked his reputation as a literary
artist in order to espouse unpopular social causes of whose justice he
is convinced--will interest all who have hearts to feel as well as
brains to think. He made his fame by consummately artistic work,
addressed to the daintiest of literacy palates; and yet in such books
as "A Hazard of New Fortunes" and "A Traveller from Altruria" he has
conscientiously taken up the defence and propagation of a form of
socialism, without blanching before the epicure who demands his
literature "neat" or the Philistine householder who brands all
socialistic writings as dangerous. Mr. Howells, however, knows his
public; and the reforming element in him cannot but rejoice at the
hearing he has won through its artistic counterpart. No one of his
literary brethren of any importance has, so far as I know, emulated
his courage in this particular. Some, like Mr. Bellamy, have made a
reputation by their socialistic writings; none has risked so
magnificent a structure already built up on a purely artistic
foundation. It is mainly on account of this phase of his work, in
which he has not forsaken his art, but makes it "the expression of his
whole life and the thought and feeling mature life has brought to
him," that Mr. Howells has been claimed as _the_ American novelist,
the best delineator of American life.[22]

Mr. Howells the poet is not nearly so well known as Mr. Howells the
novelist; and there are doubtless many European students of American
literature who are unaware of the extremely characteristic work he has
done in verse. The accomplished critic, Mr. R.H. Stoddard, writes thus
of a volume of poems published by Mr. Howells about three years
ago:[23] "There is something here which, if not new in Am