Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

[253] skill. Unluckily, the writer who has succeeded with village life always wishes to deal with more artificial society. It is as inevitable as the yearning of every clever amateur comedian to act Hamlet. Bret Harte and many of his successors handle admirably the types they knew in early life, but the moment they attempt to delineate a highly-bred woman the curtain rises on a creaking doll in starched petticoats. Few, indeed, of our early Western authors could venture to portray, what would seem not so impossible, an everyday gentleman or lady. For the East, on the other hand, Miss Jewett has been able to produce types of the old New England gentry, dwelling perhaps in the quietest of country towns, yet incapable of any act which is not dignified or gracious; and Miss Viola Roseboro has depicted such figures as that of the old Southern lady, living in a cheap New York boarding-house, toiling her life away to pay her brother's or her father's debts, and yet so exquisite in all her ways that the very page which describes her seems to exhale a delicate odor as of faded jasmine.¹

But Western literature is assuming an aspect