Mr. G.P.R.  James arrived in New York on the Fourth, and “landed amid discharges of artillery, the huzzas of assembled thousands, and such an imposing military display as is rarely seen in this country except on occasions of great moment and universal interest.”  He is certainly entitled to all the ceremonious honors he will receive during his summer in America, for no man living, probably, has contributed more to the quiet and rational pleasure of the people here than this prolific but always intelligent and gentlemanly author.  We have it from the best authority that Mr. James does not intend in any way whatever to meddle with the copyright question, and that he will not write a book about us on his return to England.  He visits the United States for a season’s agreeable relaxation, with his family, comprising his wife and daughter and three sons.  The London Morning Chronicle, in a review of one of his recent compositions, has the following piece of criticism, in contemplation of the present interruption of Mr. James’s labors:—­

“A season without two or three novels from Mr. James would be a marked year in the world of letters.  There is not a power-loom in all Manchester which works with more untiring, unswerving regularity.  Does Mr. James ever stop to think, to eat, to drink, to sleep?  Is he ever sick?  Has he ever a headache?  Is he ever out of sorts, even as other men are, when they turn away from the inkstand as from a bottle of physic?  We do not believe it.  We sometimes doubt whether Mr. James be a man at all.  Is he mortal?  Has he flesh and blood, or is he some indefinite unheard-of machine, some anomaly of nature, some freak of creation, whose mission is to make novels—­and who accordingly spins, spins away, and never leaves off for a moment—­never!  We know how M. Dumas manages to rear his wonderful literary offspring.  With all Mr. James’s fertility, however, the Frenchman has a thousand times Mr. James’s invention.  The romances of the latter are simply a series of ever-changing, yet never novel variations upon the one original theme furnished by Sir Walter Scott.  Dumas, with his eighty volumes a year, yet manages to be ever fresh, ever new.  Nobody knows, till he reads it, what a novel of the Frenchman’s will be.  Everybody, even before he cuts open page one, can tell you the certain features, the stereotyped characters, which flourish in eternal youth in the never-ending productions of James.  It is only calling them by other names, and dressing them in different costumes—­altering, in the description of a castle, the dais from the one end of the great hall to the other, or some such important revolution—­and presto, Mr. James can whip the personages and the places who flourished in one country and in one century right slap into another generation and another land.  The thing is done in a moment, and you have a new novel before you—­just as new, at all events, as is any in his list of a hundred.”

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