I wish to state, therefore, in somewhat broader terms than I have yet seen it stated, what seems to me the historical importance of Irwin Russell in American literature. His priority in the fictional use of the negro dialect has been frequently emphasized, but I wish to emphasize his priority in utilizing for literary purposes the social and institutional conditions in which he himself had lived. Skill in the use of a dialect is a purely literary excellence, but when a writer portrays and thus perpetuates the peculiar life of a people numbering four million, he is to that extent an historian; and Irwin Russell's example in this respect meant a complete change of front in Southern literature. He did not go to Italy for his inspiration as Richard Henry Wilde had done. You find no _Rodolph_, or _Hymns to the Gods_, or _Voyage to the Moon_ among his writings; but you will find that deeper poetic vision that saw pathos and humor and beauty in the humble life that others had contemned. The appearance of _Christmas-Night in the Quarters_ meant that Southern literature was now to become a true reproduction of Southern conditions. Our writers were henceforth to busy themselves with the interpretation of life at close range. They were to produce a kaleidoscopic body of fiction, each bit of which, sparkling with its own characteristic and independent color, should yet contribute its part to the harmony and symmetry of the whole. I would not for a moment compare the genius of Irwin Russell with that of Chaucer or of Burns; and yet when Chaucer in the latter part of his life turned from French and Italian sources to find an ampler inspiration in his own England, the England that he knew and loved, he was but illustrating the change that Irwin Russell was to inaugurate in Southern literature; and when Robert Burns broke through the classical trammels of the eighteenth century and lifted the poor Scotch cotter into the circle of the immortals, he was but anticipating your own Mississippian in proving that poetry, like charity, begins at home. To the student of literature, there is a wide difference between the _Prologue to the Canterbury Tales_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and the _Christmas-Night in the Quarters_; but to the student of history the poems stand upon the same plane because each is a transcript of contemporary life. Irwin Russell represents, therefore, a transition of vital significance in our literature, a transition that had been partly foretold in the work of Judge Longstreet and Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston. There is as much local coloring in the _Georgia Scenes_ and the _Dukesborough Tales_ as in the work of Irwin Russell; but I do not find the same deft workmanship; I miss in the older works the sympathy, the pathos, and the self-restraint that enable Irwin Russel to be local in his themes without being provincial in his manner.