In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed, that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present, and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as American art. It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders. This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense. The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our _fin de siècle_ novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say; none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,” “Dreams and Days,” a critic writes: