biography, a study of nature, an account of a war, what you will; but it must give information. It must be brief and readable. Technicalities must be translated into common terms, and necessarily it must be the work of an expert. Written with care and signed with the name of the author, these articles become a progressive encyclopædia of the advancement and thought of the age. Another type of magazine article is that written by Agnes Repplier, Samuel McChord Crothers, and others, which does not apparently aim at giving information but seems rather to be the familiar, halfconfidential talk of a widely read person with a gift for delightful monologue. JOHN BURROUGHS A Bird in Sight The scope of our magazine articles suggests the breadth and diversity of pure scholarship in America. Among our best-known scholars are Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), biographer and translator of Dante as well as critic of art; Francis James Child (1825-1896), editor of English and Scottish Ballads; Francis Andrew March (1825-1911), our greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar; Felix Emanuel Schelling (1858- ), our best authority on the literature of the Elizabethan Age; Horace Howard Furness (1833- ), the Shakespeare scholar; and Cornelius Felton (1807–1862), president of Harvard College, with his profound knowledge of Greek and the Greeks. 60. Juvenile literature. Books for children have been published in enormous numbers. Even in the thirties they came out by scores in half a dozen cities of New England, in Cooperstown, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere. In 1833 there was a "Juvenile BookStore" in New York city. Many authors, Hawthorne, Mrs. Ward, Mark Twain, Trowbridge, and others have written books for children, but few have written for children alone. Among these latter, the principal ones are Jacob Abbott and Louisa May Alcott. bott, 1803- More than two hundred books came from Ab1879. bott's pen, the Rollo Books, the Lucy Books, and scores of simple histories and biographies. He is always interesting, for he always makes us want to know what is coming next. When, for instance, Rollo and Jennie and the kitten in the cage are left by mistake to cross the ocean by themselves, even a grown-up will turn the page with considerable interest to see how they manage matters. Abbott never "writes down" to children. Even when he is giving them substantial moral advice, he writes as if he were talking with equals; and few childish readers of his books ever skip the little lectures. Jacob Ab Louisa May Alcott was a Philadelphia girl who grew up in Concord. She wrote for twenty years without any special success. Then she published Little Wo Little men, and this proved to be exactly what the Louisa May young folk wanted. It is a clean, fresh, Alcott, "homey" book about young people who are 1832-1888. not too good or too bright to be possible. They Women, are not so angelic as Mrs. Burnett's Little 1868. Lord Fauntleroy; but they are lovable and thoroughly human. A number of other books followed Little Women, all about sensible, healthy-minded boys and girls. Within the last fifty years or more many papers and magazines have been published for young people; such as Merry's Museum, Our Young Folks, Wide Awake, and St. Nicholas. The patriarch of them all is The Youth's Companion, whose rather priggish name suggests its antiquity. It was founded in 1827 by the father of N. P. Willis. In its fourscore years of life it has kept so perfectly in touch with the spirit of the age that to read its files is an interesting literary study. It seems a long way back from its realistic stories of to-day to the times when, for instance, a beggar — in a book - petitioned some children, "Please to bestow your charity on a poor blind man, who has no other means of subsistence but from your beneficence." The Youth's Companion has followed literary fashions; but throughout its long career its aim to be clean, wholesome, and interesting has never varied. 61. Literary progress. Counting from the very beginning, our literature is not yet three hundred years old. The American colonists landed on the shores of a new country. They had famine and sickness to endure, the savages and the wilderness to subdue. It is little wonder that for many decades the pen was rarely taken in hand save for what was regarded as necessity. What literary progress has been made may be seen by compar ing Anne Bradstreet with Longfellow and Lanier, Cotton Mather with Parkman and Fiske, the New England Primer with the best of the scores of books for children that flood the market every autumn. We have little drama, but in fiction, poetry, humorous writings, essays, biography, history, and juvenile books, we produce an immense amount of composition. The pessimist -wails that the motto of this composition is the old cry, "Bread and the games!"- that we demand only what will give us a working knowledge of a subject, or something that will amuse us. The optimist points to the high average of this writing, and to the fact that everybody reads. Many influences are at work; who shall say what their resultant will be? One thing, however, is certain, he who reads second-rate books is helping to lower the literary standard of his country, while he who lays down a poor book to read a good one is not only doing a thing that is for his own advantage, but is increasing the demand for good literature that almost invariably results in its production. THE NATIONAL PERIOD II. LATER YEARS William Dean Howells Francis Marion Crawford Edward Eggleston John Townsend Trowbridge Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Kate Douglas Wiggin Riggs James Lane Allen Much literature has been produced since the war. The greater part of it is fiction. This is marked by realism, whose apostles are Howells and James. Many authors have revealed the literary possibilities of different parts of our country. The short story has been successfully developed. Historical novels and also the one-character novel are in favor. To the poets especially, the monthly magazines have been of much advantage. New York stands at present as our poetic centre. Taylor, Stoddard, Stedman, and Aldrich are counted as part of the New York group. In 1868 Bret Harte was made famous by his stories and poems of the mining camp. Walt Whitman is a poet of no humble rank. He believed in writing on all subjects and in avoiding poetic form and rhythm, |