“Edith Linsey” was the most ambitious of the American sketches. It was a novel in outline, and had an original plot, the intellectual passion of a young student for a girl who is thought to be dying of consumption, and whose disease has imparted an exaltation to her feelings, and a nervous, spiritual intensity to her thoughts. The anti-climax comes when she unexpectedly recovers her health, and with it her worldly ambitions, and coolly jilts her quondam lover. There are passages in “Edith Linsey”--particularly in the scenes between the lovers in the library--of unusual thoughtfulness, eloquence, and emotional depth, but the story is loosely put together, and interrupted by digressions, and in the latter part of it the author seemed more concerned to deliver himself of college reminiscences and descriptions of scenery than to carry on his narrative with a firm hand. “The Gypsy of Sardis” was the best of the European sketches, and had a very moving, though slightly melodramatic, conclusion. It was a more highly finished study of Eastern scenery and life than Willis had had leisure to give in his “Pencillings.” A comparison of the two shows from what slight hints he worked up the romance,--a momentary glimpse of a gypsy girl at a tent door, and of an Arab in the slave market at Stamboul, a ride up the Valley of Sweet Waters, and a morning in the shop of old Mustapha, the perfumer. “Love and Diplomacy” and “The Revenge of the Signor Basil” were less successful, because more remote from their author’s experience. He had not the kind of imagination necessary to transport him into alien characters and situations. His fancy required some contact with its object before it would take off the electric spark.