In the course of his busy life--to give some facts not to be found in the Yonkers eulogy--Mr. Bangs has been vestryman of a church, a purchaser of books for a public library, a journalist, and a director of a private school. At present he is giving brilliant service as editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Meantime, his pen, or his typewriter, is not idle at home, as the publication a few months ago of "The Idiot at Home" attests. [Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND.] HAMLIN GARLAND Hamlin Garland is Western in every sense of that broad term. To him the West has been birthplace, playground, battlefield. Not only as a writer but also as a man he takes that far-seeing, keen, sincere, unconventional view of things in general that distinguishes the thoroughbred Westerner. Like Jim Matteson, the hero of his latest novel, he sympathizes with the elements. He might appear to be at home in an Eastern drawing-room, but we think that he would prefer to live in his own country. There might be some dissent from the opinion that he is the foremost of our Western novelists; but there can hardly be any dissent from the opinion that he occupies an unique place in American literature, for not only has he sounded a new, vibrant, resonant chord in our literature, but he also has been our one fearless and unchangeable literary impressionist. "I believe," he said once, to illustrate his rule of work, "that the beauty disease has been the ruin of much good literature. It leads to paint and putty--to artificiality. If a thing is beautiful, well and good; but I do not believe in an artist using literary varnish in writing of sordid things. He can discover the beauty in sordid lives not by varnishing them, but by sympathetic interpretation of them." The West has been his birthplace and his playground. He was born in the beautiful La Crosse Valley, Wisconsin, in September, 1860. His parents were of Scotch Presbyterian stock, which fact, together with his early environment, must account for his radical and aggressive mental outfit. "My dear old parents," he says, "brought me up like a Spartan soldier. I owe so much to my mother; to the goodness and patient sympathy with which she trained and softened my blustering boyish nature." If you look at the dedication of "Main-Travelled Roads" you will find an echo of this eulogy: "To my father and mother, whose half-century pilgrimage on the main-travelled road of life has brought them only trial and deprivation, this book is dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." This appreciation of his parents' more than dutiful sacrifices constantly finds expression in the author's work; it is a salient feature of his individuality.