We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations, are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset, Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like _bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, without being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster. Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association, for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.