where it is, and young radicals finally come to perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire. But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising advances of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called "Marjorie Daw"; when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his successors were unborn;--a time of antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made its appearance at that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand, somewhat antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius, and, however deep the impression they have produced on our literature, they have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she was a woman in the first place, and, in the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had selected. A would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and conscious of not being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden space before him, into which he must plunge without support and without guide. No wonder if, at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and ill-at-ease, and, like a raw recruit under fire, appeared affected from the very desire he felt to look unconcerned. It is much to his credit that he essayed the venture at all; and it is plain to be seen that, with each forward step he took, his self-possession and simplicity increased. If time had been given him, there is no reason to doubt that he might have been standing at the head of our champions of fiction to-day.