Johnston owed his introduction to Northern readers almost wholly to Lanier, who also was an exile in Baltimore. His influence it was that induced Gilder to accept for _Scribner's Monthly_ the first of the _Dukesborough Tales_ to be published in the North. He did far more than this: he gave him constructive criticism; he pointed out to him weaknesses which might be tolerated in a pioneer like Longstreet, but not in the work of a later artist. Certain phases of his sketches he found exceedingly strong: "The story strikes me as exquisitely funny, and your reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among the rural Georgians is really wonderful."[137] There were, however, frequent "verbal lapses" which were almost fatal, "the action of the story does not move fast enough," and the catastrophe is clumsily handled. "I will try to see you in a day or two and do this" [read the manuscript aloud to him with running criticisms]. It was an opportunity that few authors ever get; and Johnston was wise enough to make the fullest use of it. Through Lanier it was that Alden became acquainted with his work and that the enlarged _Dukesborough Tales_ was taken over by the Harpers, and it was only after the Northern issue of this book in 1883 that its author took a place among the writers of the period. During the following fifteen years he wrote voluminously. Lanier's criticism touches with skill the strength and the weakness of Johnston as a writer of fiction. Like Longstreet, he was preëminently a maker of sketches. In his novels like _Old Mark Langston_ and _Widow Guthrie_ he failed dismally. Local color there is and humor and characterization, but in all that pertains to plot management the novels are feeble. The center and soul of his art was the Georgia environment. "As long as the people in my stories have no fixed surroundings, they are nowhere to me; I cannot get along with them at all." There is little of story, little of action, little consideration of the deeper passions and motives of life: there is rather an artless presentation of the archaic provincial types and surroundings that he had known in his boyhood. Even within this restricted area his range was narrow. He seemed to be attracted, as was Longstreet, by the eccentric and the exceptional. As he looked back into his earlier years it was only the highly individualized characters and surroundings that stood out in his memory, and he peopled his stories largely with these. Like Lincoln he had traveled a primitive legal circuit in primitive days and he had had unique experiences highly laughable. His range of characters also is small. There is little of the negro in his work: he deals almost wholly with the class of middle Georgia common people that are but one step removed from the mountain cracker of Harris and Harbin.