_Curtis_, _Willis_, _Holland_.--George William Curtis belongs in the main, of course, with the essayists, where his life will be narrated. He was the author of “Prue and I” (1856), a series of papers written originally for _Putnam’s_, and together forming a slight story of charming domestic life, in which sentiment, fancy, and a broad optimistic philosophy are pervasive features; and of an unsuccessful novel, “Trumps” (1861), which he began in 1859 as a serial in _Harper’s Weekly_. In view of the broad experience of its author, his fondness for good novels, his discriminating taste, his facility in expression, this failure of “Trumps” was remarkable. The truth is that Curtis had not rightly estimated his powers. He could not manage an elaborate plot with skill, and he also made the same mistake that marred the work of many writers already noticed--he was too much concerned to point the moral. The general effect, as Mr. Cary points out,[14] is that “Trumps” becomes “a Sunday-school story, written by a man of rare gifts, some of which betray the elusive charm of genius, but still essentially of that class, producing, and apparently intended to produce, the impression that in the end virtue triumphs and vice comes to a miserable end.” In the long run, this is eternally true; but the great artists do not talk about it very much. A similar failure, though for different reasons, was the one novel written by the prolific Nathaniel P. Willis, “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” (1857), an early and dull experiment in the field of international novels. It was a story whose general distortion of things amounted almost to caricature, since it was based on superficial rather than deep and careful observation of character. In the same year Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-81) made his _début_ in the field of fiction with “The Bay Path,” a story of the settlement of the Connecticut Valley, filled largely with historical characters, and generally faithful to the manners and thought of the age portrayed. A more ambitious story, “Miss Gilbert’s Career” (1860), is a realistic modern novel in which a characteristic Yankee community is described with great fidelity. His later novels, “Arthur Bonnicastle” (1873), “The Story of Sevenoaks” (1875), and “Nicholas Minturn” (1877), cannot on the whole be said to possess high literary merit; the author was avowedly a moralist, and the best that can be said of them is that they did no harm.