The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of the country have received abundant illustration of late years.  Edward Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster, 1871, and his other novels are pictures of rural life in the early days of Indiana. Western Windows, a volume of poems by John James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an unmistakable local coloring.  Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in his Hans Breitmann ballads, in dialect, gave a humorous presentation of the German-American element in the cities.  By the death, in 1881, of Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, the South lost a poet of rare promise, whose original genius was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to co-ordinate them.  His Science of English Verse, 1880, was a most suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that theory of their relation which he was working out in his practice.  Some of his pieces, like the Mocking Bird and the Song of the Chattahoochie, are the most characteristically Southern poetry that has been written in America.  Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, in Negro dialect, are transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while his collection of stories, At Teague Poteet’s, together with Miss Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains and her other books, have made the Northern public familiar with the wild life of the “moonshiners,” who distill illicit whiskey in the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  These tales are not only exciting in incident, but strong and fresh in their delineations of character.  Their descriptions of mountain scenery are also impressive, though, in the case of the last-named writer, frequently too prolonged.  George W. Cable’s sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans attracted attention by their freshness and quaintness when published, in the magazines and re-issued in book form as Old Creole Days, in 1879.  His first regular novel, the Grandissimes, 1880, was likewise a story of Creole life.  It had the same winning qualities as his short stories and sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic force, especially in the intensely tragic and powerfully told episode of “Bras Coupe.”  Mr. Cable has continued his studies of Louisiana types and ways in his later books, but the Grandissimes still remains his masterpiece.  All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary figure of the New South, and the justness and delicacy of his representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining agency of the civil war in the States whose “cause” was “lost,” but whose true interests gained even more by the loss than did the interests of the victorious North.