sense of his commercial greatness, confident
that the point he has already attained, instead of being the climax of
his career, is the stepping-stone to yet greater wealth, besides social
distinction. Cesar Birotteau inaugurates what he believes to be his era
of magnificence with a ball, while Silas Lapham tempts fortune by
building a fine house on the back bay. Each hero projects his costly
schemes in opposition to the wishes of a more sensible and prudent wife,
and each, at the moment when fate seemed bent on crowning his ambition,
falls a prey to a series of cruel and, in a way, undeserved misfortunes,
and finds his well-earned commercial credit a mere house of cards which
totters to its fall. Each man, broken and bankrupt, displays in his
feebleness a moral strength he had not shown in his days of power: thus
the name, "the _rise_ of Silas Lapham," means his initiation into a
clearer and more exalted knowledge of his obligations to himself and to
his kind. The moral of Cesar Birotteau's "_grandeur et decadence_"
strikes a still deeper key-note. Compared with Balzac, who is never
trivial, and who has the most unerring instinct for character and
motive, Mr. Howells wastes his force on non-essentials and is carried
away by frivolities and prettinesses when he ought to be grappling with
his work in fierce earnest. Balzac, whose unappeasable longing was to
see his books the breviary, so to speak, of the people, would have
laughed and cried with Silas, lived with him, loved with him, and come
to grief with him, and forced his readers to do likewise. Mr. Howells is
not so easily carried away by his creations, and is too apt to laugh at
them instead of with them. But his mature work shows, nevertheless, a
boldness and facility which ought to put the best results within its
compass; and we confidently look for better novels from his pen than he
has so far written, full of wit, humor, and cleverness, yet expanding
outside of these gracful limitations into the fullest nature and
freedom.

/#
"A Canterbury Pilgrimage. Ridden, Written,
and Illustrated by Joseph and Elizabeth
Robins Pennell." New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons.
#/

It may be confessed that in certain respects bicycles and tricycles
answer admirably to the requirements of travellers in search of the
picturesque. They are swift or slow at need, may be halted without want
or waste, and have no vicious instincts to be combated by whip or spur.
But they are never