n allowances made for the romantic tendency) flourished in the
West; Mr. Howells, taking micro-graphic studies of present-day life in
the great centre of American culture; Mr. James, with a clever, weary
_persiflage_ skimming the face of society in refined cosmopolitan
circles; and Miss Wilkins, observing the bitter humours of the Eastern
yokel, are none of them distinctively American either in feeling or
expression. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens--otherwise Mark Twain--stands in
striking contrast to them all. He is not an artist in the sense in which
the others are artists, but he is beyond compare the most distinct
and individual of contemporary American writers. He started as a mere
professional fun-maker, and he has not done with fun-making even yet,
but he has developed in the course of years into a rough and ready
philosopher, and he has written two books which are in their own way
unique. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two best boys in the whole wide
range of fiction, the most natural, genuine, and convincing. They belong
to their own soil, and could have been born and bred nowhere else, but
they are no truer locally than universally. Mark Twain can be eloquent
when the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and
plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an
American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the
exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting
Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great
democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as
he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are
not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which all
things are visible it seems occasionally overbold and crude; but the
creed it expresses is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man who
lives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher in
course of time, and the observer's horizon widened. The limitations of
the mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in 'A Yankee
at the Court of King Arthur.' Apart from its ethics, the book is a
mistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in a
score of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snaps
into pieces under that tension.

The great war of North and South has been answerable for more fiction
than any other campaign of any age, and it has quite recen