Similar signs of promise are showing themselves in the direction of literature, social science, and higher education generally, all of which have an honored representative, still in middle life, in Professor George E. Woodberry. Professor Newcomb has just boldly pointed out that we have intellectually grown, as a nation, “from the high school of our Revolutionary ancestors to the college; from the college we have grown to the university stage. Now we have grown to a point where we need something beyond the university.” What he claims for science is yet more needed in the walks of pure literature, and is there incomparably harder to attain, since it has there to deal with that more subtle and vaster form of mental action which culminates in Shakespeare instead of Newton. This higher effort, which the French Academy alone even attempts,—however it may fail in the accomplished results,—may at least be kept before us as an ideal for American students and writers, even should its demands be reduced to something as simple as those laid down by Coleridge when he announced his ability to “inform the dullest writer how he might write an interesting book.” “Let him,” says Coleridge, “relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feeling that accompanied them.”[25] Thus simple, it would seem, are the requirements for a really good book; but, alas! who is to fulfill them? Yet if anywhere, why not in America? FOOTNOTES [1] _Outlook_, October, 1907. [2] Bancroft’s _History of the United States_, i, 247. [3] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_. [4] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 158. [5] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 119. [6] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 120. [7] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194. [8] Belknap’s _American Biography_, ii, 214. [9] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194, note. [10] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 22. [11] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 25. [12] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 566. [13] _Emerson in Concord_, 120. [14] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 264. [15] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 262. [16] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 477. [17] _Memoirs_, ii, 473. [18] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 1. [19] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 10. [20] _Address to Workingmen in Providence_, April 11, 1886, p. 19. [21] Lodge’s _George Cabot_, 12, note. [22] _Harvard Reminiscences_, by Andrew Preston Peabody, D. D., LL. D., p. 18. [23] “Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste.” _Études sur la Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Américains_, Paris, 1851. [24] _Nineteenth Century_, xxii, 324, 319. [25] _Quarterly Review_, xcviii, 456. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A