_Henry James, Jr._--A subject of contention among critics, having an ardent if not a large following, but standing for something like caviare to the general public, Henry James is to-day one of the most striking figures among American novelists. He was born in New York, April 15, 1843, the son of Henry James the theologian, and a younger brother of William James the psychologist. His family was Irish on the father’s side and Scotch on the mother’s. He has told us of his early years and of how, while the other boys were at their games, he used to sit on the hearth-rug studying _Punch_ and learning about the life which John Leech’s pictures suggested to him. At eleven he was sent abroad and spent six years in England, France, and Switzerland, deeply interested in European culture, art, and social tradition. On his return, his family made their home at Newport, Rhode Island. In 1862 he entered the Harvard Law School, but found more pleasure in the lectures of James Russell Lowell on literature than in the reading of law. Soon after leaving Cambridge, having succeeded with some early ventures in _The Galaxy_ and other magazines, he began to devote himself wholly to literature. Since 1869 he has lived abroad, chiefly in Paris, London, and Italy. His life has been a quiet, uneventful study of men and women, of books, of places. Mr. James has been a fairly prolific writer, of constantly increasing subtlety and attention to finish. His first stories, curiously enough, revealed a romantic, at times even sensational, bent, which he soon outgrew. His first novel, “Watch and Ward” (1871), was promising but not otherwise significant; “Roderick Hudson” (1875) was quite equal to the best of his later work, combining profound analysis of character with perhaps more sentiment than appears in his later works. It is a study of the artistic temperament in the person of a young American sculptor who is taken to Italy by a rich virtuoso. The story deals with two favourite studies of Mr. James: the contrast between Americans and the older races with which they come into contact in Europe, and the contrast between the artistic and the prosaic person. The first of these contrasts forms the subject of “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1875), including that exquisite story “The Madonna of the Future,” of “The American” (1877), and of “Daisy Miller, a Comedy” (1878), in which a burlesque element is noticeable. From the year 1875, then, may be said to date the “international novel” of comparison or contrast, which has become so immensely popular. In “The Europeans” (1878), the scene changes to Boston and the author shows how the life of the Puritans appears to foreign visitors. Other international studies are found in “An International Episode” (1879), “The Portrait of a Lady” (1881), one of his most popular longer novels, and “The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View” (1883). In 1880 (dated