The writing of his first novel occupied the months of May and June, 1882; it was published the same year, and at once established its author in the front rank of living American writers of fiction. Since then Crawford has written twenty volumes of fiction. Crawford is frank and he tells us how he manages to produce in a few years the amount of an ordinary lifetime. “By living in the open air, by roughing it among the Albanian mountaineers, wandering by the sunny olive slopes and vineyards of Calabria, and by taking hard work and pot luck with the native sailors on long voyages in their feluccas,” are the means of the novelist to hold health and make his pen work a laxative employment. In these picturesque journeys, he lays the foundation of his stories, makes the plots and evolves the characters. He does not believe in Trollope’s idea of sitting down, pen in hand, and keep on sitting until at its own wild will the story takes ink. The story in these excursions has been fully fashioned, and it becomes but a matter of penmanship to record it. How quickly this is done may be seen from the rapid writing of the novelist, which averages 6,000 words the working day. This rapid composition has its defects, defects that are in some measure compensated by the photographic views of the life and manners of the people. These views are in the rough, but they are truer than when toned down. Poetry needs paring. The greatest novels have been those that came like Crawford’s, fresh from the brain, and were hastily despatched to the printer. Scott did not mope over the sheets. Thackeray’s were written to the tune of “more copy.” Your American critic, Stoddard, says:—“That Crawford is a man with many talents, and with great fertility of invention, is evident in every story that he has written. He has written more good stories and in more diverse ways than any English or American novelist. It does not seem to matter to him what countries or periods he deals with, or what kind of personages he draws, he is always equal to what he undertakes.” It may interest you, in ending this biographic sketch, to add that he is a convert to the Catholic Church, and with the American critic’s idea in view, a cosmopolitan. I was not astonished by the former information. To those who know Italy and Mr. Crawford’s wonderful drawing of it, there could be but one opinion, that the faith of the novelist was the same as that of his characters. No Protestant novelist, no matter how many years he had lived in Italy, could have drawn the portraits that play in the Saracenesca pages. One of his friends had this in his mind’s eye when he wrote of the superiority of the novelist’s writings on Italy over those of his countrymen. This writer tells us that “Crawford added the indispensable advantage of being a Catholic in religion, a circumstance that has not only allowed him a truer sympathy with the life there, but has afforded him an open sesame to many things which must be