their own unbounded hospitalities on the other side, are, by the mere nature of the case, in a position curiously superior to that of the Englishmen who, for their part, had accepted every civility, it is true, by a kind of gentle compulsion, and who are really puzzled how to return these civilities, and truly ashamed of themselves for their inability to do so. Lord Lambeth looks very small beside Bessie Alden. It is the We all look small case throughout. beside the more magnanimous, the more liberal and noble being of our visitors. There is an unconscious elevation in

their ignorance which shows against the petty background of our conventional familiarity with the fade routine and vulgar prejudices of our Old World life.

The "American" was the work by which Mr. James won the attention of the English public, and it is perhaps the most forcible of his productions; but it is much the least delicate, and the real perplexities of the situation, which were quite enough to tax any reasonable imagination, are complicated by an absurdly unreal bit of melodrama quite unsuited to the scene, and impossible to the author who has not any pencils at his disposal black enough or rough enough for work of this description. The story is naïf in the extreme-almost what a Frenchman would call brutal in its simplicitly. A rich, prosperous, ignorant, wandering American, fresh from San Francisco and potential moneymaking, and entirely unacquainted with fine society, finds himself in Paris; and after a few adventures to begin within one of which he signalizes the simplicity of his uninstructedness by buying, for two thousand francs, the worthless copy of a picture in the Louvre, "for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking," and giving a commission for a number of others to the same extremely improper young person-he announces, with the utmost frankness and sincerity, his intentions in a more important matter:

"Since you ask me," said Newman, "I will say frankly that I want extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it, I shall be forty. And then I'm lonely, and help less, and dull. But if I marry now, so long as

"Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions," said Newman, "and I will marry her to-morrow."

"You have a strange tone about it, and I don't quite understand you. I didn't suppose you would be so cold-blooded and calculating.' Newman was silent a while. "Well," he said at last. "I want a great woman. I stick to that. That's one thing I can treat myself to; and if it is to be had, I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is

beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. She shall have every thing a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me; she stand, and I shall only be the better pleased. may be cleverer and wiser than I can underI want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.

"This is very interesting," said Mrs. Trismind." tram. "I like to see a man know his own

"I have known mine for a long time," Newman went on. "I made up my mind tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth having here below. It is the greatbeautiful, I mean beautiful in est victory over circumstances. When I say manners as well as in person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can."

mind and in

This supreme acquisition, alas! turns out not to be so easy as Mr. Newman, with his pockets full of dollars and his

fine ambition, thinks; but his mind is completely set upon it. "I am not afraid of a foreigner," he says when his friend Mrs. Tristram proposes to him her friend, a beautiful Parisian. "Besides, I rather like the idea of taking in Europe too. It enlarges the field of selection." In short, this offspring of the New World, without antecedents of his own, without any thing but his great fortune and the qualities by which he has made it, is determined to spend this fortune of his upon the very best thing that is to be got for the money-the finest, noblest, and most beautiful that the Old World can supply. And such is his originality, his indomitable character, and the genuine feeling in him, that he actually makes a conquest of the lady herself a perfect creature, who is, as may be supposed, not half so charming as one of Mr. James's imperfect American women. The story is very striking and amusing so long as it relates the prowess of Mr. Newman, and how he conquered every obstacle in his path. We confess, however, that we can neither comprehend why Madame la Marquise and M. le Marquis de Bellegarde, the mother and elder brother of the incomparable Claire, should have sanctioned the engagement in the first place-or why, having done so, they should immediately have broken it off. Such a scandal would have been, one would think, worse even than the marriage itself. The end of the book is very melodramatic. There is a wonderful family secret, of which Newman gets possession, and by means of which he attempts to bully the old lady and her son; but he comes no speed, and after a great many striking scenes, and some very halting ones, his brief dream is over. He has fallen in love with the beautiful lady, in his way. She satisfies him entirely. She is the very crown he has desired to his fortune. "What he felt was an intense all-consuming tenderness;" and his straightforward devotion so worked upon her, that when at last she consents to marry him, and is trying to account for the gradual growth of her satisfaction in him-" The only reason -" she says, and pauses. "Your only reason is that you love me," he murmured, with an eloquent gesture; and

for want of a better reason Madame de Cintré reconciled herself to this one.

The reader understands completely Newman's absolute and intense desire to get an exquisite wife as the best thing in the world; but it is less easy to comprehend the transaction when it comes this length; and from the date of the mysterious breaking off all is incomprehensible. The story will not bear examination. But the position of the shrewd yet visionary Californian, in face of so many forces which he has no understanding of his confidence that he can overcome the difficulties before him, and his hopeless and helpless defeat by what have seemed to him mere thin ghosts of Old World prejudice-is very ably and skilfully shown. From the moment when we find him full of admiration for the bad copy made by the young lady who was "uncommonly taking," his ignorance and self-confidence, his determination to do and have the very best of every thing, and total incapacity to understand the force and meaning of all that is against him, are kept before us with the most distinct and happy reality. His ignorance is great, but he has instincts which are finer than instruction. He does not know that Mademoiselle Nioche's picture is very bad, but he knows the perfection of womanhood which he is in search of when he sees it, and is never for a moment tempted to make an ideal of the bad little painter, though he buys her picture. He thinks, on the other hand, ignorantly and foolishly, that the pride of the decayed family in the faubourg is one of the things which such a man as he is bound to subdue. But though he is thus stumbling about in " a world not realized," and is altogether worsted and overthrown, he never loses our sympathy; we cannot think of him as vain or ignorant, though his ideas are so. His confidence in himself, though so unjustifiable, has always a certain nobleness in it; and he is never vulgar, nor commonplace, nor petty, but has in him a large and magnanimous nature-something princely and fine, notwithstanding the sharp limitations of his experience, his ignorance and false security. The Old World crushes the representative of the New. It erects before him cruel, incomprehen

sible barriers, and sucks the soul out of him, and remorselessly cuts off all his hopes. He is no match for it, though he thinks at first that he is far more than a match. This is the way in which aristocratic France deals with the American. It baffles him, confounds him, cuts off his ambition and his ideal, and makes an end of what was to have been so good-his future, the reward of his exertions, the fine dream upon which he had concentrated all his hopes.

England treats with less cruelty the American woman whom Mr. James presents to us, with a touch of indulgence for the mother country, as the representative of the New World in London. We find Miss Bessie Alden first at home in the multitudinous life of an American watering-place, where the whole population sits out in breezy verandas (called piazzas in native phraseology) within sight of the sea, in white dresses, and talks. To this society arrive two Englishmen, Lord Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont, who are made very much of by the pretty wife and beautiful sister of the New York man of business, to whom they have been introduced. Bessie Alden, the sister, is a Boston young lady, not accustomed to the gaiety of the New Yorkers, and much impressed by her first encounter with an Englishman. The picture is very pretty and charming. The girl looks at the handsome, somewhat dull, very ignorant, and perfectly good-tempered and good-mannered Englishman with a little awe. To her he is a type of that cultivated and beautiful Old World, full of associations, full of poetry, about which she has been reading all her days, and to see which is, as she says, the dream of her life. She finds in him every thing that is most attractive to the imagination and most unlike what Americans have. He is a nobleman, a lord, a duke's son, a complete impersonation of the strange, fascinating, and so different life of the old country. But though she is infinitely attracted by the phenomena of his existence, Miss Bessie is never fascinated by the individual, whom Mr. James has made, we are obliged to say, a somewhat silly and stupid young man, though he is very carefully attired in the fragmentary talk and anxious avoidance of all pretence at

any thing better, which is characteristic of Englishmen. The situation will remind the reader of that audacious and brilliant study of American manners to which we may be forgiven a passing reference-the Tender Recollections of Miss Irene Macgillicuddy. One could almost fancy that it was in a little natural national irritation against that revelation of the New York young lady and her mode of treating the wandering Englishmen that Mr. James undertook his version of his countrywoman. Yet the picture of the life of Newport, the talk and the sociability, is characteristic enough, very odd to English eyes, and perceptibly the same, though taken from a less malicious point of view, as the society of Irene Macgillicuddy. It is, however, when his gay and elegant and beatifully-dressed and pretty-mannered Americans come to London that Mr. James's intention becomes apparent. We are doubtful whether his indictment is most against the British aristocracy for not rushing to throw itself at the feet of Mrs. Westgate and Miss Alden, or against Mrs. Westgate for expecting this rush. Both are involved in the pretty and lively talk of the lady, who, conscious of having taken so many Englishmen to her heart in America, is delicately and gaily bitter as to the absence of all return on their part when she appears in their kingdom. Lord Lambeth is most anxious to return their civilities, and devotes himself to their service; but he cannot make his duchess-mother equally eager, and the whole brilliant little episode collapses in the inferred refusal by Bessie of her noble lover, which is caused, we are not sure whether by her indifference to himself, or by her indignant perception of the manner in which her proud innocence is regarded by all around him. Thus it all comes to nothing once more; and the pretty Americans go forth "to spread their conquests further," into the gayer French world, where they apparently expect a better reception, but where, as Mr. James has already shown us, still more tragic and incomprehensible hostilities lurk.

Thus we are made to see the generous open-heartedness of American society, and the mean jealousy and unresponsiveness of our own. But do not let us

say our own for Mrs. Westgate is charmingly naïve in her determination to see no society worthy of her which does not include all the dukes and duchesses, personages whom most of us scarcely take into account at all as indispensable to enjoyment.

"I don't want any superior second-rate society" (said this charming woman); "I want the society I have been accustomed to. The first time I came to London I went out to dine. After dinner, in the drawing-room, I had some conversation with an old lady. I forget what she talked about; but she presently said, in allusion to something we were discussing, Oh, you know the aristocracy do so-and-sobut in one's own class of life it is very different.'

The Americaine in England carries off the honors, though they are somewhat barren.

Want of space prevents us from noticing the other works of the series. The "Europeans," as we have said, are very shabby representatives of the Old World in the New-not at all on the same level as Newman and the Newport ladies; and nobody on this side of the Atlantic will grudge Mr. James his easy victory over them, which is very shadowy and indistinct at the same time. We never really know what they want, to start withand we are left in some uncertainty as to what they obtain. The story of Daisy Miller has a different motif from the

thing said to her?"

This is perhaps the most delicate and refined snobbishness that was ever put upon record, and Mr. James evidently knows the ways of thinking of his people. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on his side, would no doubt be edified to see how little his favorite class of gentlemen, who are not of the nobility, but with the accomplishments and tastes of an upper class," satisfy the requirements of the wives of New York merchants. These ladies take all the conventionalities of society au grand sérieux. They are wounded by the fact that Her Grace must walk before them out of a room; yet they feel themselves not in the society to which they have been accustomed when they are not with the duchesses. The picture is very amusing and characteristic, and full of candor. Miss Alden, however, who is from Boston, is very desirous of carrying with her into the best society another class not always found there-" the eminent people -the authors and artists-the clever people." "We hold them in great honor; they go to the best dinner parties," she says, with delightful simplicity. The young Bostonian is not less conscious of her superiority to "the distinguished people" than is the Marquis of Lambeth; but her sense of her power to do them honor is much more lively. Altogether there have been few things more piquant in recent literature than this contrast and contact of the Old World and the New. The American in France had much the worse of the conflict.

and the strange, beautiful, dainty, innocent, and very foolish little American girl, with her ignorant defiance of all rules, is criticized and condemned by Americans abroad, not by the society native to the places which she scandalizes. The wonderful mother, and still more wonderful little boy, are figures which must be quite familiar to every frequenter of foreign hotels; but we never met any thing so daring as Daisy herself. The end of the story is unnecessarily tragic. The poor little pretty trifler might surely have been shipped home to Schenectady, and let off with her life. There is one other little sketch in Mr. James's last volume which is wonderfully pretty and pathetic, and which he calls Four Meetings." It is the story of a little New England governess, whose "dream of her life" it has been, as with Bessie Alden, to go to "Europe," and who saves up her money with a kind of passion for this end. She comes to Europe, meets, and is immediately victimized by, an American cousin in France, to whom her money is needful, and goes back again penniless but uncomplaining, having spent but thirteen hours in that Europe for which she had so longed. It is cruel. One instinctively puts one's hand in one's pocket, wondering would it not have been possible somehow to make up Miss Caroline Spencer's loss? But it is the author's role to represent himself as entirely passive in such matters; and, on the other hand, it would have; spoiled the story. Mr. James cannot refrain from another covert fling at the Old World, by representing his

"Good morning,