she succeeded through its pages in doing much to ameliorate their unfortunate condition. Mrs. Jackson’s “Bits of Travel” (1873) and “Between Whiles” (1887) are interesting and readable. The more important later poets who have contributed to essay literature are led by that erratic but remarkable genius, Walt Whitman (1819-1892). His collected “Prose Works,” published in the year of his death, contain much more true common sense than his writings are popularly assumed to show. The main titles included in the contents are those of small volumes printed at various intervals: “Specimen Days” (1882), “November Boughs” (1888), and “Good-Bye, My Fancy” (1891). Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908) and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), who in their poetry followed the traditions established by Longfellow and Lowell, were the authors of not unimportant prose works. The former wrote three valuable books: “Victorian Poets” (1875), “Poets of America” (1885), and “The Nature and Elements of Poetry” (1892); the latter author produced two volumes of travel and reminiscence: “From Ponkapog to Pesth” (1883) and “An Old Town by the Sea” (1893). Possibly allied rather with Whitman than with the other poets just mentioned, Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) may justly stand at the close of our list of American critical writers. He subjected the methods of metrical composition to minute scrutiny, and published the results of his investigations as “The Science of English Verse” (1881). Turning then to a study of fiction, he wrote an important work entitled “The English Novel and Its Development” (1885). Since Lanier’s death, his executors have brought together many of his lectures and papers under the titles of “Music and Poetry” (1898), and “Shakspere and his Forerunners” (1902). =The Humourists.=--It is a far cry from the serious thought of Sidney Lanier to the ludicrous perversities of Mark Twain; yet between these two lies an extensive territory freely admitted by foreign critics to be distinctly and perhaps typically American. The humour of this country is different from that found anywhere else in the world. At times, it is true, it exhibits the sparkling characteristics of the Irishman’s wit, at others the keen shrewdness of the Frenchman’s _bon-mot_; certainly it is never less sprightly than the work of the English joker, nor less spontaneous than that of the German jester. In fact it may savour of any one, or of all the qualities just mentioned, and even of many others. The truth of the matter is, composite as a nation, we preserve in our humour the best traits of the elements out of which we are formed, and pretty generally add to the mixture a flavour indigenous to the soil upon which we flourish.