Mr. Howells is not only one of the most prolific of all imaginative American writers of the first rank, but within the last ten years or so he has come to be regarded as one of the foremost authorities, if not the very first, in the criticism of current poetry and romance. Hundreds of thousands of readers put themselves under the inspiration and leading of his printed talks upon books and writers of the day, and while he has been to our vast reading public one of the least seen of literary Americans, no portrait is better known than his, no man’s utterance upon any subject of literary value is more widely or eagerly considered. All the more emphatically is this latter statement true of the subjects he has now chosen for his public lectures. These themes are peculiarly his own, and the opportunity to see the very face and hear the living voice of the man himself is one that, it may safely be predicted, the whole book-loving element of American society will avail itself of with a keen and affectionate delight. G. W. CABLE. Northampton, Mass., July, ’99. * * * * * I want Mr. Howells to live to a good old age, as long as the great war horses of the platform lived. The people want to see and hear him most of all. Here is what his friend, Mark Twain, said of lecturing at the close of the American end of his tour around the world: “Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty-eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January. I haven’t had a blue day in all the twenty-eight.” George William Curtis has filled, as no other American man of letters of this generation, the ideal of clear intellect, pure taste, moral purpose, chivalry of feeling, and personal refinement and grace. The grace and culture he possessed were as natural as his courtesy and his faith in mankind. They were ingrained as part of his being, wrought into every strain and making the strands of his everyday life. [Illustration] From the moment of his entrance into public life as a speaker, now nearly fifty years ago, he entirely satisfied the higher conception of purity, dignity, and sweetness. He was a lecturer of beautiful presence and was superbly artificial, yet this artificiality was natural. His hair and beard were a beautiful silver-gray, his face was pale, his manner studied, his voice cultivated. It was as enjoyable to hear him as to listen to an opera, and was a lesson in grand manners and elocution.