Of that group of eminent New Englanders who made American literature in the middle of the last century it has become the fashion among our youth to speak with a certain condescension as of country cousins or old friends outgrown. Since Emerson and Lowell and Holmes and the other worthies of the age laid the author of The Scarlet Letter to rest in Sleepy Hollow, new generations have arisen, who have looked for a less austere leadership than New England followed, and for interpreters of appetites and passions in human nature which the "spiritual patricians" of an elder time deliberately suppressed and disdainfully ignored. Our literary historians tell us that the "national period" has arrived, and that in the widened domain of our letters the voices of the "Puritan aristocracy" must inevitably sound somewhat thin and provincial. Under the influence of European example our authors, particularly our novelists, are learning to overcome the Anglo-Saxon, or rather the Victorian, diffidence. In the choice and treatment of their themes they enjoy a liberty
