insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking—so knowing to be able to do it!—comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.” How great a friend Howells was to Mark Twain and Henry James—the three of them so much the most important American men of letters in their generation—comes vividly to light in the brilliant correspondence already made public by Albert Bigelow Paine and Percy Lubbock. James admits with a tender eagerness that the editorial hand which Howells held out to him from the _Atlantic_ in the summer of 1868 “was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring.” Mark Twain owed Howells a larger, more intimate debt than mere encouragement at the outset: nothing did more to civilize the magnificent barbarian who wrote _The Innocents Abroad_ to a point at which he was capable of writing _Huckleberry Finn_ than the friendly counsel and judicious approbation of Howells, who drew him by the “insidious practices” of a perpetually good example from journalism to literature. He who with one hand was encouraging the sensitive young dilettante, with the other was restraining the tumultuous humourist—and at the same time managing with so great devotion and dexterity his own richly unfolding career. Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James could have done it for the other two; the surest and strongest of the three was not either of those who have most usually been called the geniuses but that one who for his quietness has been so much too much unheard.