und
and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are
many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood.
Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who
once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of
cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into
great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that
half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!

It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should
appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the
Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We
had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman
and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories;
but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour
of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a
state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.

In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and
Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the
modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the
novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which
I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I
found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is
always "The House of the Seven Gables!"

But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten pages of Mrs.
Stowe with great pleasure, something she said reminded me of Walter
Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever
attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of
enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted,
so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical
persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same.
Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on
without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly
Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I
rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine
in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many
magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging f