"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds...." Absolute sincerity is the most striking quality in his masterpieces. Simplicity and brevity are next in evidence; to these are sometimes added the pathos and intensity of a Hebrew prophet. BRET HARTE, 1839-1902 LIFE.--The father of Bret Harte was professor of Greek in the Albany, New York, Female College, where his son, named Francis Bret, was born in 1839. The boy never attended an institution of learning higher than a common school. Fatherless at the age of fifteen, he went with his mother to California in 1854. Here he tried teaching school, mining, going on stages as an express messenger, printing, government service, and editing. Of his experience in California, he writes:-- "Here I was thrown among the strangest social conditions that the latter-day world has perhaps seen.... Amid rushing waters and wildwood freedom, an army of strong men, in red shirts and top-boots, were feverishly in search of the buried gold of earth.... It was a land of perfect freedom, limited only by the instinct and the habit of law which prevailed in the mass.... Strong passions brought quick climaxes, all the better and worse forces of manhood being in unbridled play. To me it was like a strange, ever-varying panorama, so novel that it was difficult to grasp comprehensively." [Illustration: BRET HARTE (From a painting by John Pettie, R. A.)] Amid such surroundings he was educated for his life work, and his idealization of these experiences is what entitles him to a sure place in American literature. After spending sixteen years in California, he returned in 1871 to the East, where he wrote and lectured; but these subsequent years are of comparatively small interest to the student of literature. In 1878 he went as consul to Crefeld in Germany. He was soon transferred from there to Glasgow, Scotland, the consulship of which he held until his removal by President Cleveland in 1885. These two sentences from William Black, the English novelist, may explain the presidential action: "Bret Harte was to have been back from Paris last night, but he is a wandering comet. The only place he is sure not to be found is at the Glasgow consulate." Bret Harte was something of a lion in a congenial English literary set, and he never returned to America. He continued to write until his death at Camberly, Surrey, in 1902. The tourist may find his grave in Frimley churchyard, England.