ench models, Balzac, De Musset,
Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Merimee, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
_bouder, se reconnait, banal_, and the like), where our English, without
being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show
an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.

But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
with le