corrections or erasures; but it is possible that Winthrop made clean
copies of his stories after composing them. Much of the dialogue,
especially, bears evidence of having been revised, and of the author's
having perhaps sacrificed ease and naturalness, here and there, to the
craving for conciseness which has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks
in the way of our young writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and
"padding," and went to the other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the
old, stale traditions of composition, and to produce something which
should be new, not only in character and significance, but in manner of
presentation. He had the ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a
longing to "tear down this tiresome old sky." But the old sky has good
reasons for being what and where it is, and young radicals finally come to
perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right
spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be
expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts
are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.

But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising advances
of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened
the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry
James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte
was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected
that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called "Marjorie Daw";
when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his successors were unborn;--a time of
antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion
upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction
was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall
back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively
in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only
models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James