The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, the reader must open his eyes to be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into his stories--characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the harmony beneath the discord. Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and associations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist is not at present writing better novels than the American. The reason seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality. The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all the luck.