one excess and the other--between the carpet-bagger and the writer of
"dialect-stories," each at his worst--I unhesitatingly choose the
latter. But that is probably because I happened to be born in the
'sixties.

Let us get back (I hear you implore) to the historical point of view,
if possible: anywhere, anywhere, out of the _Poetics!_ And I admit
that a portion of the preceding paragraph reads like a bad parody of
that remarkable work. Well, then, I believe that our imaginary
historian--I suppose he will be a German: but we need not let our
imagination dwell upon _that_--will find a dozen reasons in
contemporary life to account for the attention now paid by novelists
to "locality." He will find one of them, no doubt, in the development
of locomotion by steam. He will point out that any cause which makes
communication easier between two given towns is certain to soften the
difference in the characteristics of their inhabitants: that the
railway made communication easier and quicker year by year; and its
tendency was therefore to obliterate local peculiarities. He will
describe how at first the carpet-bagger went forth in railway-train
and steamboat, rejoicing in his ability to put a girdle round the
world in a few weeks, and disposed to ignore those differences of race
and region which he had no time to consider and which he was daily
softening into uniformity. He will then relate that towards the close
of the nineteenth century, when these differences were rapidly
perishing, people began to feel the loss of them and recognize their
scientific and romantic value; and that a number of writers entered
into a struggle against time and the carpet-bagger, to study these
differences and place them upon record, before all trace of them
should disappear. And then I believe our historian, though he may find
that in 1894 we paid too much attention to the _minutiæ_ of dialect,