"Life of Lincoln," published in 1865, and three or four novels which had considerable success. His most characteristic writings, however, were didactic essays, the most successful of which were the series entitled "Timothy Titcomb's Letters to Young People." Others were called "Lessons in Life," "Letters to the Joneses," and "Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects." Here is a stray passage from this last : "I account the loss of a man's life and individuality, through the non-adaptation or the mal-adaptation of his powers to his pursuits, the greatest calamity, next to the loss of personal virtue, that he can suffer in this world. I believe that a full moiety of the trials and disappointments that darken a world which, I am sure, was intended to be measurably bright and happy, are traceable to this prolific source. Men are not in their places. Women are not in their places. John is doing badly the work that William would do well, and William is doing badly the work that John would do well; and both are disappointed and unhappy, and self-unmade. It is quite possible that John is doing Mary's work and Mary is doing John's work. "Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "it might have been."' “Now, I do not suppose that we shall ever get the world all right on this matter. I do not suppose that all men will find the places for which they were designed, or that, in many instances, Maud will marry the Judge; but an improvement can be made; and if an improvement ever shall be made, it will be through the inculcation of sounder views among the young." The reverent way in which he quotes the very worst rhyme in which Whittier ever imbedded a commonplace, and then alludes to Maud Muller and her Judge as if they were equally immortal with the Bible, typifies that sort of commonplace which made Dr. Holland dear to less cultivated people. It is saved from indignity by its apparent unconsciousness of limitation. A similar quality pervaded his verse, some of which is preserved by Stedman and Hutchinson. His honesty, his kindness, and his sound moral sense endeared him to the general public, and in their own way did much to strengthen the homely principles of our level country. He sold thousands of volumes, he lived honourably, and he died respected. Another writer, somewhat similar in general character, but less versatile, was the Reverend Edward Payson Roe, born in✔ New York State in 1838, for a while a student at Williams College, a volunteer chaplain during the Civil War, and afterwards a Presbyterian minister at Highland Falls, New York. In 1872 he published a novel called " Barriers Burned Away which proved so successful that he gave up the ministry, and settling down in a small town on the Hudson River produced a steady stream of novels until his death in 1888. Whitcomb's "Chronological Outlines of American Literature" record the titles of nineteen of them. They are said to have had extraordinary popular success. They did nobody any harm; and their general literary quality and power of doing good already seem inconsiderable. There have been many other writers in New York meanwhile, but few of much eminence who are not still alive. Of one, who died not long ago, the promise seemed more than usual. Henry Cuyler Bunner, for years editor of "Puck," was so busy a journalist that only persistent effort allowed him time for any but his regular work. The verses and the stories which he has left us, then, are only a fragment of what might have been, had he had more leisure, or had he been spared beyond the early middle life when unhappily his career ended. Throughout this apparently ephemeral work, however, there is a touch so sympathetic, so sensitive, so winning, that there seems a peculiar fitness in his enduring monument. The chief literary prize at Columbia College, the chief seat of learning in his native city, is one lately founded in his memory. Of all these writers, and of the scores more who wrote at the same time, and most of whom are writing to-day, the volumes of Stedman and Hutchinson will give some impres sion. In former times Griswold and Duyckinck made similar collections of literature in American. As we have seen, both alike properly included many names for which Stedman and Hutchinson have found no room. It is hard to resist the conclusion that whoever shall make a new library of American literature, thirty or forty years hence, will by the same token find no place for many of our contemporaries momentarily preserved by our latest anthologists. As you turn their pages, you can hardly avoid feeling that, however valuable these may be as history, they contain little which merits permanence. Depressing as this may at first seem to patriotic spirit, it has another aspect. As we look back on the literary records of New England, we can perceive in its local history a trait like one which has marked those more fortunate regions of the old world whose expression has proved lasting. Artistic expression is apt to be the final fruit of a society about to wither. For generations, or perhaps for centuries, traditions grow until they reach a form which locally distinguishes the spot which has developed them from any other in the world. Then, at moments of change, there sometimes arises, in a race about to pass from the living, a mysterious impulse to make plastic or written records of what the past has meant. These are what render even Greece and Italy and Elizabethan England more than mere names. So one gradually grows to feel that only the passing of old New England made its literature possible. The great material prosperity of New York, meanwhile, has attracted thither during the past forty years countless numbers of energetic people from all over the world, — foreigners, New Englanders, Westerners, Southerners, and whomever else. In this immigrant invasion the old New York of Irving and Cooper and the rest has been swallowed up. There is now hardly a city in the world where you are so little apt to meet people whose families have lived there for three successive generations. Our new metropolis, in fact, is not only far from such a stage of decline as should mark the beginning of its passage from life to history, but it has not even formed the tangible traditions which may by and by define its spiritual character. What its features may finally be, then, we may only guess. On the whole, one inclines to guess hopefully. Beneath its bewildering material activity there is a greater vitality, a greater alertness, and in some aspects a greater wholesomeness, of intelligence than one is apt to find elsewhere. It is not that the artists and the men of letters who live there have done work which even on our American scale may be called great. It is not that these men, or men who shall soon follow them, may be expected to make lasting monuments. It is rather that about them surges, with all its fluctuating good and evil, the irresistible tide of world-existence. The great wealth of New York and its colossal material power, of course, involve a social complexity, and at least a superficial corruption, greater than America has hitherto known; and the men who live amid this bustling turmoil are habitually in contact with base things. Yet hundreds of them, sound at heart, think and speak with a buoyant courage which, even to a New Englander, seems almost youthfully to preserve that fresh simplicity of heart so characteristic of our ancestrally inexperienced America. You You may shake your head at them, or smile, as much as you will; they impart to you, despite yourself, a mood of inexplicably brighter hopefulness than their words, or the facts which those words set forth, seem to justify. So, very generally, we may say that our Middle States, as they used to be called, are now dominated by New York. This town, whose domination for the moment is not only local but almost national, owes its predominance to that outburst of material force which throughout the victorious North followed the period of the Civil War. What may come of present there is little it no one can tell. Of the past and the to remark beyond what we have remarked already. There is, |