Ten thousand copies were sold in a few days; over three hundred thousand in a year; eight power-presses were kept running day and night to supply the continual demand. The British Museum now contains thirty-five complete editions in English; and translations exist in at least twenty different languages. “Never did any American work have such success!” exclaims Mrs. Child, in one of her enthusiastic letters.... “It has done much to command respect for the faculties of woman.” The influences are, indeed, broad and general, which have since that day removed all restrictions tending to impress inferiority on the woman writer, so that the distinction of sex is lost in the distinction of schools. Yet a special influence may be attributed to this single marked manifestation of force, to this imposing popular triumph. In the face of the fact that the one American book which had stormed Europe was the work of a woman, the old tone of patronage became ridiculous, the old sense of ordained and inevitable weakness on the part of “the female writer” became obsolete. Women henceforth, whatever their personal feelings in regard to the much-discussed book, were enabled, consciously or unconsciously, to hold the pen more firmly, to move it more freely. In New England fiction, what a leap from the work of Miss Sedgwick, worthy as it is, to that of Mrs. Stowe! The field whence a few hardy growths were peeping, seems to have been overflowed by a fertilizing river, so rich is its new yield. It is the “soul of Down-East” that we find in “The Minister’s Wooing”” and “Oldtown Folks.” Things spiritual are grasped with the insight of kinship, externals are drawn with the certainty of life-long acquaintance. If we glance at the humorous side of the picture, surely no hand that ever wrought could have bettered one smile-provoking line in the familiar figure of Sam Lawson, the village do-nothing. There is a free-handedness in the treatment of this character, not often found in more recent conscientious studies of local types. It is a painting beside photographs. A certain inequality, it may be admitted, appears in the range of Mrs. Stowe’s productions. They form links, more or less shining, between a time of confused and groping effort on the part of women and a time of definitely directed aims, of a concentration that has, inevitably, its own drawbacks.