Now this order and clarity were Howells himself, and with the friendly charm of his personality they make beautiful the little body of memoirs for which he is unsurpassed in the literature of his country. American boyhood has nowhere been more goldenly recalled than in _A Boy’s Town_. Nowhere may there be encountered more lovely records of a dreaming and yet ambitious adolescence than in _Years of My Youth_. _My Literary Passions_ contrives to make the mere account of Howells’s reading seem more exciting than the adventures of most men and more beguiling than many intrigues considerably less innocent. _My Mark Twain_ is the most exquisite tribute yet paid by one American man of letters to another. And _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, best of all pictures of the classic days of Cambridge and Boston when Howells was editor of the _Atlantic_, is no less classical than the original productions which the period put forth. But superlatives, though true, are terribly unavailing. And how do justice to the subtlety of his senses, the tenderness of his affections, the range and hospitality of his sympathies, the strength yet generosity of his ambition, the firmness of his will, the temperateness of his behaviour, his resolute fair-mindedness, his unprejudiced reverences, his undivagating shrewdness, and his great treasures of good humour? Occasionally there do occur men who disarm all censure—at least for a time—and in the midst of a censorious world it is pleasant now and then to let down the visor and throw by the spear and shield. Such a man Raphael was; and in a different way and world such a man Howells has been. V. NOOKS AND FRINGES ON HATING THE PROVINCES Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield, whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been quite understandable that a second or third generation after them would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example, the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the villatic bourgeoisie.