“It is strange,” remarks Lady Wilde, “how often a great genius has given a soul to a locality.” We may prefer our own illustration to hers, and remember in simpler fashion what Judd’s “Margaret” did for a little village in Maine, or what Howe did for a little Western town, instead of insisting that Walter Scott created Scotland or Byron the Rhine. But the remark suggests, perhaps, quite as forcibly, what locality has done for genius. The majority of writers who have tried to deal with people, whether as novelists, poets, or essayists, localize their human beings until “local color” becomes one of the most essential factors of their success. Sometimes, like Judd and Howe, they make the most of a very narrow environment; sometimes, like Cable, they make their environment include a whole race, till the work becomes historical as well as photographic; sometimes, like Mrs. Jackson, they travel for a new environment; sometimes, like Howells and James, they travel from environment to environment, and write now of Venice, now of London, now of Boston, with skill equal to the ever-varying opportunity; sometimes, like George Eliot writing “Romola,” or Harriet Prescott Spofford writing “In a Cellar,” they stay at home and give wonderful pictures of a life and time they have never known--compelled, at least, however, to seek the environment of a library. Even Shakspeare, who was certainly not a slave to his surroundings, sought local color from books to an extent that we realize on seeing Irving’s elaborate efforts to reproduce it. Even Hawthorne, escaping from the material world whenever he could into the realm of spirit and imagination, made profound studies of Salem or Italy the basis from which he flew to the empyrean. To understand perfectly how fine such work as this is, one must have, one’s self, either from experience or study, some knowledge of the localities so admirably reproduced.