novels of contemporary New England which established his fame
as a writer. "A Modern Instance" and "The Rise of Silas Lapham" are
perhaps the finest stories of this group; and the latter novel may prove
to be Mr. Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity." We cannot here
follow him to New York and to a new phase of novel writing, begun with
"A Hazard of New Fortunes," nor can we discuss the now antiquated debate
upon realism which was waged in the eighteen-eighties over the books
of Howells and James. We must content ourselves with saying that a
knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is essential to the student of the
American provincial novel, as it is also to the student of our more
generalized types of story-writing, and that he has never in his long
career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page. "My
Literary Friends and Acquaintance" gives the most charming picture ever
drawn of the elder Cambridge, Concord, and Boston men who ruled over our
literature when young Howells came out of the West, and "My Mark Twain"
is his memorable portrait of another type of sovereign, perhaps the
dynasty that will rule the future.

Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies
of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that
section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London,
anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish
merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit,
a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord,
and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born
in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of
deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country,
without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed
or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent
ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of
a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and
then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that
"American Scene" which he understood far less truly than the average
immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American
citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy
with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political
emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. A