To the general public the volume which followed—­“In the Levant”—­was perhaps of even deeper interest.  At all events it dealt with scenes and memories with which every reader, educated or uneducated, had associations.  The region through which the founder of Christianity wandered, the places he visited, the words he said in them, the acts he did, have never lost their hold over the hearts of men, not even during the periods when the precepts of Christianity have had the least influence over the conduct of those who professed to it their allegiance.  In the Levant, too, were seen the beginnings of commerce, of art, of letters, in the forms in which the modern world best knows them.  These, therefore, have always made the lands about the eastern Mediterranean an attraction to cultivated men and the interest of the subject accordingly reinforced the skill of the writer.

There are two or three of these works which can not be included in the class just described.  They were written for the specific purpose of giving exact information at the time.  Of these the most noticeable are the volumes entitled “South and West” and the account of Southern California which goes under the name of “Our Italy.”  They are the outcome of journeys made expressly with the intent of investigating and reporting upon the actual situation and apparent prospects of the places and regions described.  As they were written to serve an immediate purpose, much of the information contained in them tends to grow more and more out of date as time goes on; and though of value to the student of history, these volumes must necessarily become of steadily diminishing interest to the ordinary reader.  Yet it is to be said of them that while the pill of useful information is there, it has at least been sugar-coated.  Nor can we afford to lose sight of the fact that the widely-circulated articles, collected under the title of “South and West,” by the spirit pervading them as well as by the information they gave, had a marked effect in bringing the various sections of the country into a better understanding of one another, and in imparting to all a fuller sense of the community they possessed in profit and loss, in honor and dishonor.

It is a somewhat singular fact that these sketches of travel led Warner incidentally to enter into an entirely new field of literary exertion.  This was novel-writing.  Something of this nature he had attempted in conjunction with Mark Twain in the composition of “The Gilded Age,” which appeared in 1873.  The result, however, was unsatisfactory to both the collaborators.  Each had humor, but the humor of each was fundamentally different.  But the magazine with which Warner had become connected was desirous that he should prepare for it an account of some of the principal watering-places and summer resorts of the country.  Each was to be visited in turn and its salient features were to be described.  It was finally suggested that this could be done most