settled his quarterly accounts with unfailing punctuality, but always deducted fifteen per cent. on the ground that he had been intimate with Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps this was carrying the power of literary association a little too far.

VI

Of American novelists and of Robert Louis Stevenson; with some remarks about criticism.

F the book-lover cares to devote a little time

to the study of good, old English, he may perhaps glance over the pages of Areopagitica, in the neat edition published by the Grolier Club in 1890, with Lowell's graceful introduction. "Bookes," said the great poet, "demeane themselves as well as men. Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are: nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. lesse warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason itselfe, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."

Un

The dignity of books, as thus announced by the famous creator of Paradise Lost, is not as manifest in these days as it was in the olden time. Novels have done much to impair their distinction; and yet novels are not always trifles, and the study of them is the study of contemporaneous life, although few novel readers are much concerned about the taste or the utility of what they are reading. Some of our old American novelists may be worth a moment's kindly thought.

It is possible that some living men or women women are the most voracious consumers of fiction - have read all of the works of Charles Brockden Brown, the so-called pioneer of American letters, but I am disposed to be incredulous about it. Until Cooper invaded the field, Brown was the most eminent story-writer in this promising country, as any one may learn by consulting the Cyclopædia of Biography, to whose enticing pages the student is referred. Brown was only thirty-nine when he died, but he wrote voluminously, and he should be famous for his efforts to establish a real literary magazine which should not be a mere annex to a publishing house. Donald Grant Mitchell conceded that Brown was an interesting figure in the history of American literary development, but he says that he "could never bring himself into a state of enjoyment in reading one of his books-not even for a dozen consecutive pages." 1

In this twentieth century few readers know anything of Wieland or of Arthur Mervyn, and yet the vivid description of the yellow-fever scourge in Philadelphia is said almost to rank with De Foe's story of the London Plague. "Wieland is a grewsome story," says Mitchell. Arthur Mervyn "might stop a hundred pages before it ends." I have seen a goodly number of books in my time, but I have never encountered a complete set of Brown's. American though he was, he was destined to fall into oblivion here until his novels began to be read and praised in England. Not long after Brown's untimely death his Memoirs were produced by William Dunlap, historian of the American stage and godfather of the Dunlap Society which has given us so many interesting reprints and essays in dramatic literature. I believe that the American edition was published in 1815; my own copy is the English edition, entitled "Memoirs of Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist, author of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, etc., with selections from his original letters and miscellaneous writings," and printed for Henry Colburn & Co.,

American Lands and Letters, vol. i., 181.

by J. Green, Leicester Square, 1822. On the whole, it is a poor thing, but there is much in the faded, wide-margined, slightly foxed pages which has a certain interest. "Books are too often insipid"; "I hate a lecturer"; "Few labour whose wealth allows them to dispense with it"; "A female cannot evince a more egregious negligence of reputation than by personating a man." Perhaps these remarks are not strikingly new, but they are as true today as they were when Brown uttered them; and it required long years of patient endurance to bring mankind to the point of confessing a hatred for lecturers and their "arid dogmatism." Brown once had an odd mishap, owing to the vagaries of the printer. He wrote for an Edentown newspaper a poetic address to Dr. Franklin, praising the sage and setting forth how Philosophy "turns with horror and disgust from those who have won the laurel of victory in the field of battle to this her favorite candidate, who had never participated in such bloody glory." With a fine sense of the fitness of things, Typo substituted the name of Washington for that of Franklin, indulging in a malicious ingenuity peculiar to his tribe.

Brown was probably searching for an excuse to avoid uncongenial work when he refused to be a lawyer, professing "that he could not