While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in which the right answer is got by wrong working, _The Bostonians_ (1886) reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to "come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of some dead men's transitory irritations.