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