To say that one prefers La Farge’s travel books to his travel sketches is not to disparage the sketches, for the books were extraordinarily good. He had a great admiration for Fromentin’s _Une Année dans le Sahel_, and perhaps that volume had not a little to do in suggesting the form of the volumes on Japan and the South Seas. They are impressionistic in that they record moods, thoughts, and talks that make up a quite perfect text for his sketches. They are both grave and gay, profound and volatile, forceful and yet charming. La Farge had the literary sense quite as much as the pictorial, and had he chosen to make a profession of letters he would perhaps have risen to as great a height as he did in painting. While a student under Hunt at Newport he became well acquainted with Henry James, whom he later on advised to take up literature. In the light of subsequent achievement that must be regarded as good advice, and yet James had the pictorial cast of mind and might have made a fine painter. At any rate, some of his best work in writing was his criticism of painting. La Farge, too, with a mind pictorially inclined, put out some of his best thoughts in a book of art criticism entitled _Considerations on Painting_. It was delivered originally as lectures to art students, but it must have shot far over their little heads. It is too profound to be grasped at once and often requires a second reading to apprehend the meaning, but it is the best piece of art criticism put forth in America. In kind and excellence it ranks with Fromentin’s _Les Maîtres d’autrefois_--the classic of the craft. Fromentin was about the only writer on art that La Farge cared for. He was kind enough to send me a copy of his _Considerations on Painting_ when it was published, and later, in talking over the book with him, he took occasion to remark (as afterward in print) that he had read thousands of pages of art criticism “without finding anything that a person seriously devoted to his profession of art could find of the slightest use.” At the time I ventured to suggest to him that aid to artists was not the object of art criticism, that an attempt to instruct professionals would argue greater knowledge in the critic than in the artist and be presumptuous, that the critic wrote for the public and thought to be of service by calling attention to and explaining certain things that might otherwise be overlooked or misjudged. Moreover, it was suggested that the writer, too, had his design and pattern in words which he was trying to work out artistically and decoratively, and that the subject, whether criticism, history, poetry, or fiction, was of as little importance with him as with the painter. Ruskin in art criticism, Newman in sermons and lectures, and Carlyle in history and essay were possibly greater artists than Dickens and Thackeray in fiction.