beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many
points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence
working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable
led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the
justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the
remainder of his life in a distant region.

The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion
in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution
only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in
its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither
era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his
observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore
down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a
curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the
literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little
body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit
upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a
contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories
are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the
whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a
significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once
as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore.

Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human
beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local
colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods
stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far
West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward
Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John