ittle or nothing to say; that is their misfortune, no
doubt; but it is not their fault, for, apparently, each one of them made
the best of his native gift.

In his time Milton was the most careful and conscientious of artists in
verse-making, and so, in his turn, was Pope, whose ideals were
different, but whose skill was no less in its kind. So, again, was
Tennyson untiring in seeking to attain ultimate perfection of phrase,
consciously employing every artifice of alliteration, assonance and
rime. But, if Milton's verse seems to us now noble and lofty, while
Pope's appears to us as rather petty and merely clever, surely this is
because Milton himself was noble and his native endowment lofty, and
because Pope himself was petty and his gift only cleverness; surely it
is not because they were both of them as much interested in the
mechanics of their art as was Tennyson after them.

One of the wittiest critics of our modern civilization, the late
Clarence King, remarked, some ten years ago, that the trouble with
American fiction just then lay in the fact that it had the most
elaborate machinery,--and no boiler. But the fault of our fiction at
that time was to be sought in the absence of steam,--and not in the
machinery itself which stood ready to do its work, to the best advantage
and with the utmost economy of effort, just so soon as the power might
be applied.

(1904.)

OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES

Thackeray was frequent in praise of Fenimore Cooper, hailing
Leatherstocking as better than any of "Scott's lot"; and this laudation
appeared in the 'Roundabout Papers' long after the British novelist had
paid to the American romancer the sincere flattery of borrowing from the
last words of Natty Bumppo the suggestion, at least, of the last words
of Colonel Newcome. Cooper's backwoodsman, hearing an inaudible
roll-call had responded "Here!" a score of years before Thackeray's old
soldier had become again a child to answer "Adsum!" Not less than a
score of years later an old sailor in one of the stories of Sir Walter
Besant made his final exit from this world with a kindred phrase, "Come
on board, sir!" And then, once more, in one of Mr. Kipling's 'Plain
Tales from the Hills,' we find the last dying speech and confession of a
certain McIntosh who had been a scholar and a gentleman in days gone by,
and who had sunk into irredeemable degradation in India. When his hour
came, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as