=The Forties.=--The decade of 1840-50 saw the advent of no writers of enduring reputation. “Charles Elwood, or The Infidel Converted” (1840), a kind of philosophical autobiography by Orestes A. Brownson (1803-76), is really an essay in the guise of a novel, and can here only be mentioned. Brownson was successively a Presbyterian, a Universalist, a Unitarian, and a Roman Catholic; as a thinker, he might be called a Christian Socialist. Epes Sargent (1813-80), a student at Harvard College, who became a journalist and a popular dramatist, was the author of several juveniles, two of which, “Wealth and Worth” (1840) and “What’s to be Done?” (1841), had a large sale; and of two now forgotten novels, “Fleetwood, or The Stain of Birth” (1845) and “Peculiar, a Tale of the Great Transition” (1864), a story of changes in the South in the Civil War. Washington Allston’s “Monaldi” (1841), an Italian romance with an Othello-like _motif_, really belongs to an earlier generation, having been written as early as 1821, and intended apparently for publication in Dana’s _Idle Man_. It is a powerful but harrowing story in which the progress of jealousy is traced throughout its course. Maria J. McIntosh (1803-78), losing her fortune in the panic of 1837, adopted authorship as a means of support and wrote a number of juveniles, the first of which was “Blind Alice” (1841), and all of which were intended to illustrate the moral sentiments. Some of her stories were reprinted in London; and she continued to write for more than twenty years. Maria Brooks (1795-1845), a once highly praised but now forgotten poet, in 1843 privately printed a prose romance, “Idomen, or The Vale of Yumuri,” which was really an autobiography, including much poetical description and reflection. _Sylvester Judd._--The most successful picture of old New England life ever written, down to the time of its publication (1845), was “Margaret, a Tale of the Real and Ideal.” It was this book which Lowell, in his “Fable for Critics,” spoke of as the first Yankee book With the _soul_ of Down East in ’t, and things farther East, As far as the threshold of morning, at least, Where awaits the fair dawn of the simple and true, Of the day that comes slowly to make all things new.