In most of his writings the heart, somehow, is left out.  We have seen that Irving, from his knowledge of England and America, and his long residence in both countries, became the mediator between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.  This he did by the power of his sympathy with each.  Henry James has likewise interpreted the two nations to one another in a subtler but less genial fashion than Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have developed under different institutions.  In his novel, The American, 1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing of opposed social systems.  In such clever sketches as Daisy Miller, 1879, the Pension Beaurepas, and A Bundle of Letters, he has exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and behavior.  In The Europeans, 1879, and An International Episode, 1878, he has reversed the process, bringing Old World standards to the test of American ideas by transferring his dramatis personae to republican soil.  The last-named of these illustrates how slender a plot realism requires for its purposes.  It is nothing more than the history of an English girl of good family who marries an American gentleman and undertakes to live in America, but finds herself so uncomfortable in strange social conditions that she returns to England for life, while, contrariwise, the heroine’s sister is so taken with the freedom of these very conditions that she elopes with another American and “goes West.”  James is a keen observer of the physiognomy of cities as well as of men, and his Portraits of Places, 1884, is among the most delightful contributions to the literature of foreign travel.

Mr. Howells’s writings are not without “international” touches.  In A Foregone Conclusion and the Lady of the Aroostook, and others of his novels, the contrasted points of view in American and European life are introduced, and especially those variations in feeling, custom, dialect, etc., which make the modern Englishman and the modern American such objects of curiosity to each other, and which have been dwelt upon of late even unto satiety.  But in general he finds his subjects at home, and if he does not know his own countrymen and countrywomen more intimately than Mr. James, at least he loves them better.  There is a warmer sentiment in his fictions, too; his men are better fellows and his women are more lovable.  Howells was born in Ohio.  His early life was that of a western country editor.  In 1860 he published, jointly with his friend Piatt, a book of verse—­Poems