and mental equipoise. Beyond question, _The
Nation_ is one of the ablest weekly papers in the world; the admirable
scholarship of its articles and reviews in departments of special
knowledge might well be a subject of pride to any American. But its
inadequate reviews of current fiction add nothing to its value, and its
habitual tone of condescending depreciation in treating imaginative
literature of indigenous origin is one of the strongest discouragements
to literary production.

The main value of good criticism lies in its readiness and penetration
in discovering and applauding merit not before recognized, or
imperfectly recognized. This is a conspicuous trait of Sainte-Beuve, the
greatest of all newspaper critics. He knew how to be severe upon
occasion, but he saw talent in advance of the public and dispensed
encouragement heartily, so that he made himself almost a foster-father
to the literature of his generation in France. But there is a class of
anonymous reviewers in England and America who seem to hold a
traditional theory that the function of a critic toward new-born talent
is analogous to that of Pharaoh toward the infant Jewish population[1].

During the first year after its publication "The Hoosier School-Master"
was translated into French and published in a condensed form in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_. The translator was the writer who signs the
name M. Th. Bentzon, and who is well known to be Madame Blanc. This
French version afterward appeared in book form in the same volume with
one of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's stories and some other stories of
mine. In this latter shape I have never seen it. The title given to the
story by Madame Blanc was "Le Maitre d'Ecole de Flat Creek." It may be
imagined that the translator found it no easy task to get equivalents in
French for expressions in a dialect new and strange. "I'll be dog-on'd"
appears in French as "devil take me" ("_diable m'emporte_"), which is
not bad; the devil being rather a jolly sort of fellow, in French. "The
Church of the Best Licks" seems rather unrenderable, and I do not see
how the translator could have found a better phrase for it than
"_L'Eglise des Raclees_" though "_raclees_" does not convey the double
sense of "licks." "_Jim epelait vite comme l'eclair_" is not a good
rendering of "Jim spelled like lightning," since it is not the celerity
of the spelling that is the main consideration. "_Concours
d'epellation_" is probably the best e