chronicle the uneventful life of a Virginia plantation, and show, by no means to their discredit, the influence of The Sketch-Book and Bracebridge Hall upon their author. Kennedy had humor and a seeing eye, and three years later justified in a measure the promise of these sketches by his novel of the Revolution, Horse-Shoe Robinson, which still finds readers.

The same tone of quiet urbanity caught from Irving is to be found in the work of James Hall (1793-1868), whose best book is The Wilderness and the War Path (1846). His stories and sketches date from 1820, and chronicle the life of the West in a faithful pedestrian style. The curious may sample it in The French Village (1829), which Professor Baldwin prints with some welldeserved cutting in his collection of American Short Stories.1 Hall also related tales of the supernatural with an air of mild indulgence. His frequent defects, which are characteristic of the time, are false sentiments and rhetorical wordiness.

Professor Baldwin also reprints in wisely abbreviated form 2 The Inroad of the Navajo by

Albert Pike (1809-1891) who published Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country in 1834, and who is better known perhaps for his books on freemasonry. Pike's sketches are of some descriptive interest. He had a considerable sense of background, but little structural ability. Some critics profess to see in his work a foreshadowing of Cable's subtlety. This is inquiring too curiously. He is much too direct and eager, and has not caught the spirit of Creole languor. We feel, moreover, that he is a traveler who records what is strange around him rather than a loving chronicler of a vanishing past.

(Of Nathaniel P. Willis (1806-1867), much was written in his own day, but he is hardly a legend in ours. An adept of sentimental Byronism, he set a fashion, and his bad stories and worse rhymes were widely imitated. To us he appears as a prophetic parody of Oscar Wilde. His historical importance as a fatal influence upon his time compels me to mention him here, and if he must be read at all, the least unfavorable opinion of him will probably be formed by glancing at Two Buckets in a Well, which is reprinted in the

fourth volume of Scribner's Stories by American Authors.1 }

(Caroline M. S. Kirkland (1801-1864) is rather less depressing. Her style descends from Irving by way of Miss Mitford, and was admired by Poe. The stories in Western Clearings (1846) are weak in structure, but the characterization is frequently not bad, and her use of dialect convinces us upon the whole, where that of her contemporaries is usually absurd. Moreover, she is satisfied to hint, while they remorselessly tell us everything.) A pruned version of The Bee-Tree reprinted by Professor Baldwin,2 and The Schoolmaster's Progress reprinted by Alexander Jessup in The Best American Humorous Short Stories offer the reader an opportunity to form his own judgment. One might find worse reading upon a rainy day.

It must be confessed that a prolonged study of these five writers would be a dreary task, but there is one little-known story-teller of considerable skill of whom I have postponed speaking until now at the risk of chronological confusion, because

he will serve as an excellent point of transition to our consideration of Hawthorne.

X William Austin was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts in 1778, graduated from Harvard University, spent a couple of years in England where he mingled freely in literary and political circles, practiced law upon his return, wrote in his leisure moments a number of admirable short stories which appeared in the magazines and annuals of the time, and died in Boston in 1841. A selection from his stories was published in 1890, and has long been out of print. His best story Peter Rugg, the Missing Man was reissued with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1910, but a collected edition of his tales is the first of the three desiderata which I shall have occasion to mention in the course of this book, in the hope that three important but forgotten contributions to American literature may be recovered from the past.

Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, as we now have it, is in two parts. The first part appeared in the New England Galaxy on September 10, 1824. A supplement to the tale was published seventeen years later in The Boston Book. It has the same legendary value as Rip Van Winkle and The

Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and yet by some ill-fortune it has never become a familiar part of our literary memory. In the psychological subtlety of its craftsmanship, it points the way to Hawthorne. That Hawthorne knew and admired the story, which appeared while he was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, is proven by the fact that he makes an allusion to it in the climax of his sketch, A Virtuoso's Collection in Mosses from an Old Manse. This fact has been pointed out by more than one critic previously. A fact of equal interest, which has not hitherto been observed, is that there is a marked parallelism in situation between Peter Rugg and Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country.

The narrative is set in an atmosphere of romantic twilight, but the realization of that atmosphere is vivid and continually present to the reader. Moreover the emphasis is psychological, and this is a new quality in American story-telling which marks an important milestone. In both respects, the effect upon Hawthorne's method can be traced. Colonel Higginson has pointed out further parallels. Austin laid the scene of his story at a time midway between the colonial and the modern period, and also utilized appropriate historic and