Hartford, May 5, ’85. 
My dear Howells,--.....Who taught you to read?   Observation and thought,
I guess.   And practice at the Tavern Club?—­yes; and that was the best
teaching of all: 

Well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points home to that audience—­absolute proof of good reading.  But you couldn’t read worth a damn a few years ago.  I do not say this to flatter.  It is true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already gone.

Alas, Osgood has failed at last.  It was easy to see that he was on the very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to hope—­but not expect that he would pull through.  The Library of Humor is at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it.

To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure, perhaps you had better send down and get it.  I told him, the other day, that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for its delivery to you.

In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus the Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words.  This makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first.

He looks mighty well, these latter days. 
                                        Yrs Ever
          
                                        mark.

“I am exceedingly glad,” wrote Howells, “that you approve of my reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the platform next winter..... but I would never read within a hundred miles of you, if I could help it.  You simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.”

To W. D. Howells, in Boston: 

Elmira, July 21, 1885. 
My dear Howells,—­You are really my only author; I am restricted to you,
I wouldn’t give a damn for the rest.

I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork.  I wouldn’t read another of those books for a farm.  I did try to read one other—­Daniel Deronda.  I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven’t any romance literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books.