so much like himself that he trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping bores and getting time for real work; the Brick Moon, a story of a projectile built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the Rag Man and Rag Woman, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding-cards, etc., that came to them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis; and the Skeleton in the Closet, which shows how the fate of the Southern Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain hoop-skirt, “built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark.”  Mr. Hale’s historical scholarship and his habit of detail have aided him in the art of giving vraisemblance to absurdities.  He is known in philanthropy as well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy, practical way with them in consonance with his motto, “Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand.”

It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a century.  The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and their work is therefore incomplete.  But on the slightest review of it two facts become manifest; first, that New England has lost its long monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the growth of realistic fiction.  The electric tension of the atmosphere for thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress of great public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poetry and literary idealism than present conditions are.  At all events there are no new poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of the elder generation, although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. Stoddard and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in New York and afterward in Boston, have written creditable verse; not to speak of younger writers, whose work, however, for the most part, has been more distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native impulse.  Mention has been made of the establishment of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, which, under the conduct of its accomplished editor, George W. Curtis, has provided the public with an abundance of good reading.  The old Putnam’s Monthly, which ran from 1853 to 1858, and had a strong corps of contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued by that name till 1870, when it was succeeded by Scribner’s Monthly, under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the Century, an efficient rival of Harper’s in circulation, in literary excellence, and in the beauty of its wood-engravings, the American school of which art these two great periodicals have done much to develop and encourage.  Another New York monthly, the Galaxy, ran from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant White.  Within the last few years a new Scribner’s Magazine has also taken the field.  The Atlantic, in Boston, and Lippincott’s, in Philadelphia, are no unworthy competitors with these for public favor.