To write of Howells “at home” seems to write particularly of Howells. There is a great deal of the homely and the home-keeping feeling in his books, which has had to do with making him the chosen novelist of the intelligent masses. To one who knows this and his personal habits, it would not seem most proper to look for him in courts or camps, in lively clubs, at dinners, on the rostrum, or in any of the noisier assemblages of men. (Even in his journeyings, in those charming books, “Venetian Life” and “Florentine Mosaics,” he is a saunterer and gentle satirist, without the fire and zeal of the genuine traveler.) All these he enjoys, no one more so, at the proper time and occasion, but one would seek him most naturally in the quiet of his domestic circle. And even there the most fitting place seems yonder desk, where the work awaits him over which but now his thoughtful brow was bending. He is a novelist for the genuine love of it, and not in the way of arrogance or parade, nor even for its rewards, substantial for him though they are. One would say that the greatest of his pleasures was to follow, through all their ramifications, the problems of life and character he sets himself to study. In a talk I had with him some time ago, he said, incidentally: “Supposing there were a fire in the street, the people in the houses would run out in terror or amazement. All finer shades of character would be lost; they would be merged, for the nonce, in the common animal impulse. No; to truly study character, you must study men in the lesser and more ordinary circumstances of their lives; then it is displayed untrammeled.”