timate view of Hawthorne, our great classic; none at all of Parkman
and Fiske, our historians; or of writers like Howells, James, and Cable,
or Wilkins, Jewett, and Deland, and a worthy company of story-tellers.

We may well be on our guard against a vaunting nationalism. It retards
our culture. There should be no confusion of the second-rate values of
most of our American products with the supreme values of the greatest
British classics. We may work, of course, toward an ultimate
appreciation of these greatest things. We fail, however, in securing
such appreciation because we have failed to enlist those forms of
interest which vitalize and stimulate literary studies--above all, the
patriotic or national interest. Concord and Cambridge should be dearer,
as they are nearer, to the young American than even Stratford and
Abbotsford; Hawthorne should be as familiar as Goldsmith; and Emerson,
as Addison or Burke. Ordinarily it is not so; and we suffer the
consequences in the failure of our youth to grasp the spiritual ideals
and the distinctively American democratic spirit which find expression
in the greatest work of our literary masters, Emerson and Whitman,
Lowell and Lanier. Our culture and our nationalism both suffer thereby.
Our literature suffers also, because we have not an instructed and
interested public to encourage excellence.

Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more
distinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells; and it
is to make his delightful writings more widely known and more easily
accessible that this volume of selections from his books for the young
has been prepared as a reading-book for the elementary school. These
juvenile books of Mr. Howells contain some of the very best pages ever
written for the enjoyment of young people. His two books for boys--_A
Boy's Town_ and _The Flight of Pony Baker_--rank with such favorites as
_Tom Sawyer_ and _The Story of a Bad Boy_.

These should be introductory to the best of Mr. Howells' novels and
essays in the high school; for Mr. Howells, it need scarcely be said, is
one of our few masters of style: his style is as individual and
distinguished as it is felicitous and delicate. More important still,
from the educational point of view, he is one of our most modern
writers: the spiritual issues and social problems of our age, which our
older high-school pupils are anxious to deal with, are alive in his
books. Our young people