There was a kind of writing, not fish or flesh or good red herring, but just the same altogether charming in its day, inspiring of dreams, and a vehicle for pleasant fancy.  It belonged to what, from our grave old point of view, was the youth of the world, and the spirit of youth, its ingenuousness, and its ardour, were needed to appreciate it.  Ik Marvel’s “Reveries of a Bachelor” was of that genre—­and how the hearth logs blazed and the fair faces flickered in the flames in those pages of Mr. Donald G. Mitchell!—­and George William Curtiss’s “Prue and I”; and the latter book was one of the first in which was to be found the flavour of the old Fifth Avenue.  Then there were the forgotten novelists of the seventies and early eighties, and some who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House.  All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period.  There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed “thrillers” were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago.  That was the late Archibald Clavering Gunter.  The present generation knows him and his works not at all; but how a past generation used to read and reread “Mr. Barnes of New York,” and “Mr. Potter of Texas,” and “Miss Nobody of Nowhere,” and “That Frenchman,” which should have been called “M.  De Vernay of Paris.”  Those were the earliest and the “big four.”  The list of successors is a long one, but that certain something, that indefinable quality, which had made the first books great trash was irrevocably gone.  Of all the flamboyant characters of the tales Mr. Barnes was deservedly the most popular, and at such times as he was not winning international rifle matches at Monte Carlo, or racing about Europe in respectable pursuit of desirable young ladies, he inhabited a dwelling on lower Fifth Avenue.  Practically all Fifth Avenue were the scenes of “Miss Nobody of Nowhere,” with its charming heroine and her adopted parents, its wicked English nobleman, and its comical little Anglo-maniac dude.  Under some name or other a “Gussie Van Beekman” was a necessary ingredient of every Gunter novel.

It is a far cry from Gunter to Henry James, though each wrought according to his lights, and served his purpose in his time.  It was when the Avenue was in its infancy that Dr. Sloper, of James’s “Washington Square,” went to live in the brick house with white stone trimmings, that, practically unchanged, may be seen today, diagonally across the street from the Arch.  The novelist wrote of the locality as having “a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city”; and ascribed to it, “a richer, riper look than any of the upper ramifications