James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[189] fantastic in her likings; so are most fastidious people; so is Emerson. She might be egotistical and overbearing. But she was honest and true. It was apt to be the strong, not the weak, whom she assailed. Her greatest errors were committed in vindicating those whom others attacked, or in dethroning popular favorites to make room for obscurer merit. A different course would have made her life smoother and her memory less noble.

In her day, as now, there were few well-trained writers in the country, and they had little leisure for criticism; so that work was chiefly left to boys. The few exceptions were cynics, like Poe, or universal flatterers, like Willis and Griswold. Into the midst of these came a woman with no gifts for conciliation, with no personal attractions, with a habit of saying things very explicitly and of using the first person singular a good deal too much. In her volume of “Papers on literature and art,” published in 1846, there is a preface of three pages in which this unpleasant grammatical form occurs just fifty times. This is very characteristic; she puts the worst side foremost. The preface once ended, the rest of the book seems wise and gentle, and only egotistic here and there.

Or at least, nothing need be excepted from this claim, except the article on “American literature” --the only essay in the book which had not been previously published. Gentle this was not always, nor could it be; and she furthermore apologized for it in the preface (wisely or unwisely), as prepared too hastily for a theme so difficult, and claimed only that it was “written with sincere and earnest feelings, and from a mind that cares for nothing but what is permanent and essential.” “It should, then,” she adds, “have some merit, if only in the power of suggestion.” It certainly has such merit. It is remarkable, after twenty years, to see how many of her judgments have been confirmed by the public