In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder’s chief work, “Men and Letters,” to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well-known New York editor, he says: “In that former state of existence when we were poets, you wrote verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you which you speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you bound your manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on the shelf, and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman.” Later, he says of himself, “Fortunately, I have been able for the most part to work out of the glare of publicity.” Yet even to this modest phrase he adds acutely: “But there is always that something in us which whispers _I_, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired of listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a little, and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though the sound startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not quite content always to sit in the dark with his guests.” The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubtedly the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase “Men and Letters”; a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it, and which yet contained some of the very best of American thought and criticism. It manifests even more than his “Life of Lowell” that faculty of keen summing up and epigrammatic condensation which became so marked in him that it was very visible, I am assured, even in the literary councils of his publishers, two members of which have told me that he often, after a long discussion, so summed up the whole situation in a sentence or two that he left them free to pass to something else. We see the same quality, for instance, in his “Men and Letters,” in his papers on Dr. Mulford and Longfellow. The first is an analysis of the life and literary service of a man too little known because of early death, but of the rarest and most exquisite intellectual qualities, Dr. Elisha Mulford, author of “The Nation” and then of “The Republic of God.” In this, as everywhere in the book, Mr. Scudder shows that epigrammatic quality which amounted, whether applied to books or men, to what may be best described as a quiet brilliancy. This is seen, for instance, when, in defending Mulford from the imputation of narrowness, his friend sums up the whole character of the man and saves a page of more detailed discussion by saying, “He was narrow as a cañon is narrow, when the depth apparently contracts the sides” (page 17). So in his criticism called “Longfellow and his Art,” Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might well have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, “He was first of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather than in their essence” (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he