That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen.  His Partners of Providence suffers from the inevitable comparison with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which it cannot stand, though it continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but The Fugitive Blacksmith has a flavor which few comparisons and no neglect can spoil.  Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little masterpieces of the picaresque.  Though it is clumsily garnished with irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable.  The blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences.  Whereas other picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see him rise to each emergency.  He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his history is a quaint Odyssey of the roving artisan.

The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory, has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt, because there has been only one period—­and that a brief one—­of historical romance since the war.  In connection with this matter, however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American imagination.

Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become a cult.  Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of pardoning innocent offenders.  Out of the efflorescence of all these aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has since seemed to be emerging—­though the older aspects still persist as well—­a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human.  Among poets of all grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero:  Edwin Arlington Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master’s reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric