to give us the benefit of the corrections he had made on “Baedeker’s Handbooks” during his peregrination of Europe.  “Here,” he said, “is one error which I am absolutely sure of:  you call this a statue of Minerva; but I know that’s wrong, because I saw Pallas carved on the pedestal!” When I told this tale to English friends, they saw in it nothing but a proof of the colossal ignorance of the travelling American.  To my mind, however, it redounded more to the credit of America than to its discredit.  It showed that Americans of defective education felt the need of culture and spared no pains to procure it.  A London tradesman with the education of my American friend would probably never extend his ideas of travelling beyond Margate, or at most a week’s excursion to “Parry.”  But this indefatigable tourist had visited all the chief galleries of Europe, and had doubtless greatly improved his taste in art and educated his sense of the refined and beautiful, even though his book-learning had not taught him that the same goddess might have two different names.

The application of this anecdote to the present condition of American literature is obvious.  The great fact is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the great hope is that they will eventually work their way up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer air.  America has not so much degraded a previously existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to those who under old-world conditions might never have come to it.  In American literature as in American life we find all the phenomena of a transition period—­all the symptoms that might be expected from the extraordinary mixture of the old and the new, the childlike and the knowing, the past and the present, in this Land of Contrasts.  The startling difference between the best and the worst writers is often reflected in different works by the same author; or a real and strong natural talent for writing will be found conjoined with an extraordinary lack of education and training.  An excellent piece of English—­pithy, forcible, and even elegant—­will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, such as the use of “as” for “that” ("he did not know as he could"), or of the plural for the singular ("a long ways off").  Mr. James Lane Allen, the author of a series of refined and delicately worded romances, can write such phrases as “In a voice neither could scarce hear” and “Shake hands with me and tell me good-by.” ("The Choir Invisible,” pp. 222, 297.)

I know not whether the phrase “was graduated,” applied not to a vernier, but to a student, be legitimate or not; it is certainly so used by the best American writers.  Another common American idiom that sounds queer to British ears is, “The minutes were ordered printed” (for “to be printed").  Misquotations and misuse of foreign phrases are terribly rife; and even so spirited and entertaining a writer as Miss F.C.  Baylor will write:  “This Jenny, with the esprit de l’escalier of her sex, had at once divined and resented” ("On Both Sides,” p. 26).  In the same way one is constantly appalled in conversation by hearing college graduates say “acrost” for “across” and making other “bad breaks” which in England could not be conjoined with an equal amount of culture and education.