their readers desire. Among these is the travel sketch, to me a very
agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline. There are
some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and
a possible surfeit. Travel itself has become so universal that
everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has
no longer the charm of strangeness. We do not think the Old World
either so romantic or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an
instinctive perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to
our sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and
places. Of course this can hold true only in a general way; the thing
is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly. When one
thinks of the long line of American writers who have greatly pleased in
this sort, and who even got their first fame in it, one must grieve to
see it obsolescent. Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville,
Ross Browne, Ik Marvell, Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr.
Aldrich, Colonel Hay, Mr. Warner, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C.W. Stoddard, Mark
Twain, and many others whose names will not come to me at the moment,
have in their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it;
but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in a
sketch of travel, or a study of foreign manners and customs; his work
would have to be of the most signal importance and brilliancy to
overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been done already; and
I believe that a publisher if offered a book of such things, would look
at it askance, and plead the well-known quiet of the trade. Still, I
may be mistaken.

I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary
species, namely, the light essay. We have essays enough and to spare,
of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and
deal with conditions; but the kind I mean, the slightly humorous,
gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once
did. I do not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his
readers' frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom
find them in the magazines. I certainly do not believe that if anyone
were now to write essays such as Mr. Warner's "Backlog Studies," an
editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them.
Nobody seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly
contributed to the periodica