I come now to speak of the writings which Winthrop left. These have the singular merit, that they are all American. From first to last, they are plainly the work of a man who had no need to go to Europe for characters or scenery or plot,--who valued and understood the peculiar life and the peculiar Nature of this continent, and, like a true artist and poet, chose to represent that life and Nature of which he was a part. His stories smack of the soil; his characters--especially in "John Brent," where his own ride across the continent is dramatized--are as fresh and as true as only a true artist could make them. Take, for instance, the "Pike," the border-ruffian transplanted to a California "ranch,"--not a ruffian, as he says, but a barbarian. "America is manufacturing several new types of men. The Pike is one of the newest. He is a bastard pioneer. With one hand he clutches the pioneer vices; with the other he beckons forward the vices of civilization. It is hard to understand how a man can have so little virtue in so long a body, unless the shakes are foes to virtue in the soul, as they are to beauty in the face. "He is a terrible shock, this unlucky Pike, to the hope that the new race on the new continent is to be a handsome race. I lose that faith, which the people about me now have nourished, when I recall the Pike. He is hung together, not put together. He inserts his lank fathom of a man into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy and husky is the hair Nature crowns him with; frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles in his walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank. His oaths are to his words as Falstaff's sack to his bread. I have seen Maltese beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New-York aldermen, Digger Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever seen are thorough-bred Pikes." This is not complimentary, but any one who has seen the creature knows that it is a portrait done by a first-rate artist. Take, again, that other vulgarer ruffian, "Jim Robinson," "a little man, stockish, oily, and red in the face, a jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even in his travel-stained attire,"--and how accurately does he describe the metamorphosis of this nauseous grub into a still more disgusting butterfly! "I can imagine him when he arrives at St. Louis, blossomed into a purple coat with velvet lappels, a brocaded waistcoat, diamond shirt-studs, or a flamboyant scarf pinned with a pinchbeck dog, and red-legged, patent-leather boots, picking his teeth on the steps of the Planters' House." Or, once more, that more saintly villain, the Mormon Elder Sizzum.