icism, rich in references and quotations, without once happening on Lowell or on Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable.

Colonialism is scarcely an adequate explanation for this devotion to the firstrate, second-rate, and third-rate writers of a foreign country to the neglect of the first-rate writers of her own. Perhaps the secret is to be sought rather in Miss Repplier's lack of literary standards. In literature as in some other things a woman's opinion is often personal and accidental; it depends on the way the book has happened to strike her; the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Miss Repplier fails to apprehend the distinction between the authors who are to be taken seriously and the writers who are not to be taken seriously—between the man of letters who is somebody and the scribbler who is merely, in the French phrase,pue/conyue—nobody in particular. There is no need to go over the list of the persons from whom Miss Repplier quotes, and with whose writings she seems to have an equal familiarity; certain names on it are those of comic personalities not to be accorded the compliment of serious criticism.

Despite Miss Repplier's reliance on those British authors who have come to America to enlighten us with lectures in words of one syllable—to borrow a neat phrase of Colonel Higginson's—her Points of View are well chosen, and the outlook from thera is pleasant. She writes brightly always, and often brilliantly. She does herself injustice by her deference to those whom she invites to her board, for she is better company than her guests. Her criticism one need not fully agree with to call it generally sensible and well put, and sometimes necessary. Perhaps her best pages contain her protest against critical shams and literary affectations. She has no patience with the man who, while really liking Mr. Haggard's tales of battle, murder, and sudden death,absurdly pretends to a preference for Tolstoi and Ibsen, whom his soul abhors. She has pleasant humor in her remark that those who read Robert Elsmere nowadays would think it wrong to enjoy Tom Jones, while the people who enjoyed Tom Jones—when it first came out — would have thought it wrong to read Robert Elsmere; and "that the people who, wishing to be on the safe side of virtue, think it wrong to read either, are scorned greatly as lacking true moral discrimination."

A bias in favor of one's own countrymen is absurd when it leads us to accept native geese for swans of Avon; but even then it is more creditable than a bias in favor of foreigners. So it is to be hoped that some of Miss Repplier's Philadelphian friends will take her to Independence Hall next Fourth of July and show her the bell that proclaimed liberty throughout the land. Then, on their way home, they might drop into a book-store and make Miss Repplier a present of Colonel Higginson's The New World and the New Book, and of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge's Studies in History (wherein is to be found his acute account of " Colonialism in America "), and also of that volume of Lowell's prose which contains the famous essay " On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners."

1892

DISSOLVING VIEWS 1.—OF MARK TWAIN'S BEST STORY

|HE boy of to-day is fortunate indeed, and, of a truth, he is to be congratulated. While the boy of yesterday had to stay his stomach with the unconscious humor of Sandford and Merton, the boy of to-day may get his fill of fun and of romance and of adventure in the Story of a Bad Boy, in Treasure Island, in Tom Brown, and in Tom Sawyer, and then in the sequel to Tom Sawyer, wherein Tom himself appears in the very nick of time, like a young god from the machine. Sequels of stories which have been widely popular are not a little risky. Huckleberry Finn is a sharp exception to the general rule of failure. Although it is a sequel, it is quite as worthy of wide popularity as Tom Sawyer. An American critic once neatly declared that the late G. P. R. James hit the bull's-eye of success with his first shot, and that forever thereafter he went on firing through the same hole. Now this is just what Mark Twain has not done: Huckleberry Finn is not an attempt to do Tom Sawyer over again. It is a story quite as unlike its predecessor as it is like. Although Huck Finn appeared first in the earlier book, and although Tom Sawyer reappears in the later, the scenes and the characters are otherwise wholly different. Above all, the atmosphere of the story is different. Tom Sawyer was a tale of boyish adventure in a village in Missouri, on the Mississippi River, and it was told by the author. Huckleberry Finn is autobiographic; it is a tale of boyish adventure along the Mississippi River told as it appeared to Huck Finn. There is not in Huckleberry Finn any one scene quite as funny as those in which Tom Sawyer gets his friends to whitewash the fence for him, and then uses the spoils thereby acquired to attain the highest distinction of the Sundayschool the next morning. Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and the