That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine quality interested us in his modest preludings.  Marked, as they no doubt were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that “stinting,” as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale “ere he beginneth sing,” there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.  Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.  He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a sensation,—­one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and, as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it.  We made occasion to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase our interest.  This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor’s desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of the humanities.  But there are some men who are born cultivated.  A singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,—­as interesting a phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter.  Where is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so long been the bugaboos of European refinement?  Here was a natural product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of “Walt Whitman” to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was perfectly artificial.  Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable.  Unless we are mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells which is a better argument for the American social and political system than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.

We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells’s new volume about Venice as “delightful.”  The artist has studied his subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the better moods of Watteau.  We do not remember any Italian studies so faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the “Roba di Roma” of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the works of Henri Beyle.  But Mr. Story’s volumes