ecent years), even when they have
dealt with themes chosen from their own surroundings. There is nowhere
in the world, and never was until now, and possibly never again will be,
such another field for the born student of human nature as is afforded
by the United States at this time. The world has never seen such an
intimate mixture of racial elements as may be found there. A glance
at the Newspaper Directory shows the variety and extent of the foreign
elements which, though in rapid process of absorption, are as yet
undigested. Hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of journals minister to
the daily and weekly needs of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Norwegians,
Swedes, Russians, Hungarians. There are Polish newspapers, and Armenian,
and Hebrew, and Erse and Gaelic. Sleepy old Spain is rubbing
shoulders with the eager and energetic races of Maine and New York and
Massachusetts. The negro element is everywhere, and the Chinese add a
flavour of their own to the _olla podrida_. So far no American writers
of fiction have seen America in the large. Bits of it have been
presented with an admirable art; but as yet the continent awaits its
Dickens, its Balzac, its Shakespeare, or its Zola.

Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the California
of to-day. 'Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire,' but the old
life lives in some of its pages still, and will find students for a long
time to come. He has given us three, perhaps, of the best short stories
in the world, and a man who has done so much has a right to gratitude
and goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world all
the essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survived
in the race for popularity. Bret Harte's first book was something like
a revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of Dickens, but his
surroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange.
He bewitched the whole reading world with 'The Luck of Roaring Camp,'
and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat,' and ever since those days he has gone
on with a tireless vivacity, telling the same stories over and over
again, showing us the same scenes and the same people with an apparent
unconsciousness of the fact of repetition which is truly astonishing.
The roads of dusty red and the scented pine groves come back in story
after story, and Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look like
immortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did something
virt