Washington Irving in spite of E.W. Howe.

The village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. There it lay in
the mind's eye, neat, compact, organized, traditional: the white church
with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of the ringing
anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses; the venerable
parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord
softened or outwitted in the end; the village belle, gossip, atheist,
idiot; jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children; cool parlors,
shining kitchens, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns,
and comfortable winter evenings. These were elements not to be discarded
lightly, even by those who perceived that time was discarding many of
them as the industrial revolution went on planting ugly factories
alongside the prettiest brooks, bringing in droves of aliens who used
unfamiliar tongues and customs, and fouling the atmosphere with smoke
and gasoline. Mr. Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_ had long ago
made it cynically clear--to the few who read him--that villages which
prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant
backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and
round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain
in _The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg_ had more recently put it bitterly
on record that villages which prided themselves upon their simple
virtues might from lack of temptation have become a hospitable soil for
meanness and falsehood, merely waiting for the proper seed. And Clarence
Darrow in his elegiac _Farmington_ had insisted that one village at
least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss.
_Spoon River Anthology_ in its different dialect did little more than to
confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies.

That Mr. Masters was not neglected must be explained in part, of course,