_Fitz-James O’Brien._--Another brilliant writer whose career was cut short by the war was Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-62), a native of County Limerick, Ireland. He was educated at the University of Dublin; and after spending his inheritance of £8,000 in London, he came to America in 1852 and from that time on devoted himself to literature. In New York he became a prominent figure among the Bohemian set and won distinguished social and literary success. Besides much clever verse, he wrote for the magazines some marvellously ingenious tales, for example “The Diamond Lens,” “The Wondersmith,” “The Golden Ingot,” and “Mother of Pearl.” The reader is occasionally reminded of Poe and Hawthorne, but is more often led to wonder why O’Brien has so long lain in neglect; for some of his stories are powerful in a high degree. Like Winthrop, O’Brien in 1861 became a soldier in the Seventh New York Regiment and went to the front. On February 26, 1862 he was severely wounded in a skirmish, and in April he died. Nearly twenty years later, his friend William Winter edited “The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien” (1881). =The Civil War.=--It is not surprising that the Civil War partially, at least, dried up the springs of literature and art in America. It was an epoch of concentration, of action; men had little time for reading novels or writing them; the newspaper any day might chronicle as sublimely heroic or as pathetic events as could be found in fiction. Comparatively few novels of distinction were written, therefore, during the war and the two or three years following it, the Reconstruction period. Some worthy novels which appeared in those years, for example Mrs. Stoddard’s “Morgesons,” failed of an appreciative audience. The close of the war marked the beginning of a new era in American fiction. As Mr. Morse points out, people no longer cared for stories about the Indians and about the Revolution. The Indians had retreated into that world of romance with which the modern world, ignorant of “Nick of the Woods,” associates them; the Revolution was ancient history by the side of the more terrible conflict just ended, and a quarter of a century must elapse before the earlier war would make a background for fiction. Romance, which, as we have seen, had already begun to lose favour, must now yield to realism; there must be pictures of life at home, in the market-place, in the fields, in the teeming cities; there must be greater skill in handling the narrative so as to make it a transcript from daily life. The lover of romance will doubtless deplore this tendency; but it was inevitable, and it has dictated the path of fiction almost to the present day.