That Europe, with its ancient culture, its aristocratic intellectual circles and its concentrated audiences, should have produced great critics, is not, after all, so much to be wondered at,--surely, hardly more to be marvelled at than the emergence of the great playwright, the great novelist. That the United States, in recent years, reveals the promise of notable criticism, is somewhat more a cause for congratulation in that here we lack--or up to yesterday, lacked--inspiring intellectual leaders. But at least we possessed the paraphernalia, the apparatus, the national wealth. We had publishers, we had printing-presses, we had a generally literate populace, whatever the use to which the populace put those capabilities. Our young writers did not have to seek publishers abroad, whence alone could come likewise, literary consecration. That a Rodó should arise in Spanish America--and more than one notable critic had preceded him--or that a Verissimo should appear in Brazil, is fairly a triumph of mind over matter. It is true that such an event would have been impossible without the influence--and the decided influence--of European culture; but it is a triumph, none the less. And it is the sort of triumph that comes from the sacrifice of material boons to values less tangible, yet more lasting. I do not mean that Verissimo went about deploring the humble position of the artist and the true critic in Brazil; I am a mite mistrustful of self-analytic martyrs, of whom we are not exempt in these United States. He exercised a deliberate choice. Much of his work first appeared in the newspapers, and this alone must stand as a tribute to the organs that printed his critiques. For the rest, his life and labours serve to prove that south of the Rio Grande, no less than north, economic materialism and the life of the spirit are at everlasting grips with each other, and that there are men (again on both sides of that stream) who are masters rather than slaves of the chattels they possess.