These “Slingsby” papers are exceedingly clever. With the possible exception of “Letters from under a Bridge” and portions of “Pencillings by the Way,” they are the best work that Willis ever did; and they compare well with such lighter fiction, in the way of short tales or sketches of travel and adventure, as has been produced in America since Willis’s day. Whatever else they are, they are never dull and always readable. They are not read now only because the readers of light fiction habitually follow the market and inquire merely for the last thing out. Many of them were worked over from his “American Monthly” _juvenilia_, but his touch had grown firmer and he had purchased experience, as his motto declared, by his “penny of observation.” These “Inklings” do not penetrate to the stratum of real character, of strong passion, and of the interplay of motives and moral relations in which all vital fiction has its roots. Their plots are commonly slight, their persons sketchy, their incidents not seldom improbable, their coloring sometimes too high. As transcripts of actual life such stories as “Pedlar Karl,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” and “Tom Fane and I,” with the easy optimism of their conclusions and their cheerful avoidance of all the responsibilities imposed upon the dwellers in this workaday world, are of course misleading and false. Their air is the air of every day, but their happenings are those of the wildest romance. Their charm--and they have for many old-fashioned readers a quite decided charm--does not lie in truth to life, but in the vivacious movement of the narrative, the glimpses of scenery by the way, the alternations of sentiment and gayety, neither very profound, but each for the time sincere and passing quickly into one another; and finally in the style, always graceful, and in passages really exquisite. It has recently been announced that style is “increasingly unimportant,” but can this be true? Not surely, unless fiction is to become hereafter a branch of social science and valuable only for its accurate report of life. It will then be the novelist’s duty to obliterate himself in his message, and any intrusion of his personality between the reader and the subject will be an impertinence. But it is hard to believe that the personal element is to lose its place in fiction and be banished to the realm of autobiography and lyric poetry. Style may be a purely external part of an artist’s equipment, but it is a necessary part all the same. A bad man or a weak man may have it, but that does not make it any the less indispensable for the good man intending literature. Willis was born with it; it showed in his manners, in his dress, in his writing. Whatever he did was done with an air.