Thomas Nelson Page is never sectional in his writing. Everything that he writes tends to bring about better feeling between the North and the South. He is now ambassador to Rome, appointed by President Wilson. [Illustration: JAMES LANE ALLEN] James Lane Allen, a romanticist of Kentucky, is the subject of one of the six intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “American Novelists.” JAMES LANE ALLEN Monograph Number Four in The Mentor Reading Course A historical novelist worthy to rank with Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Lane Allen has been called. Both have given us pictures of the lives of our forefathers; but, while Hawthorne has shown us New England, Allen draws the Blue Grass region of Kentucky and its people. It may be due to the fact that James Lane Allen was a seventh child that he has achieved such remarkable success in literature. He was born in Fayette County, near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1849, the youngest child of Richard and Helen Allen. He can number among his paternal ancestors some of the first settlers of Virginia. One of these ancestors, Richard Allen, moved to Kentucky, where he lived the easy, hospitable life of a gentleman farmer on his large estate. Mr. Allen’s mother was a descendant of the Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish and the Brooks family of Virginia. A native of Mississippi, she was a lover of nature and literature. She inspired in her son a love for reading old romances, poetry, and history. Although Allen was only twelve years old when the storm of Civil War broke over our country, he was old enough to realize its horrors and the suffering that it brought to the people of the South. Just before the beginning of the war his father lost his fortune; so the formal education that Allen received was small; but under his mother’s guidance he pursued his studies at home. Long walks in the fields and forests about his home gave him a keen insight into nature. He was graduated from Transylvania University at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1872, and three years later received a degree of A. M. from there. A little before this his father died, and James had to begin teaching in order to meet expenses. He spent a year as master in a country school, walking six miles to and from the school every day. For two years he taught in Missouri and then came back to Kentucky as a private tutor. He was called to his alma mater to teach, and two years later Bethany College, in West Virginia, offered him the chair of Latin and higher English.