tent to be typical. All her people have the same background, live in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without arrière-pensée. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes's brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection of type. "Town" will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of London-and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England, we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.

As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading

her, is the extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this way than others- Under the Lilacs, for example, or Jack and Jill, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics) there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally inexcusable amount of love-making, it is interesting to remember, in much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, Little Women. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.

The next and equally astounding-result of re-reading Miss Alcott was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways, underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. "Don't talk about 'labelling' Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle !"—thus Jo chides her little sister for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to

be) to write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, "Don't that sound sort of elegant and rich?”

The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no other young people's stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so unbrokenly and sincerely "literary." Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as everyday matters; and "a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into" Jo's first novel. In The Rose in Bloom, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember that Emerson's Essays helped on, largely, Mac's wooingif, indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an "abode of learning"-to slip, for a moment, into the very style of Jo's Boys-like unto Plumfield, crowned by "Parnassus"? After all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott's young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is everywhere even in the mouths of the educators.

Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners-their morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott's people are, as the author herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so; and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March's strictures on the Moffats and Polly's justifiable criticisms of Fanny Shaw's friends? and Rose's utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe, the little scullerymaid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of course, Archie's mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phoebe, but she is soon reconciled-and apologetic.

Granted their unworldliness, their high scale of moral values, where, then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad? They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. "My mother is a lady," Polly reflects, "even if"-even if she is not rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentlefolk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred. It is the "plain-living" side of the "high thinking." They despised externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding, as such, is simply not a product of the

independent village. (Some one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent, with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the "county families.") The villagers have not-and who supposes that Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it?-the gift of civilized contacts. A contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation. Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors. alike-and lived informally!

In Miss Alcott's world, all that is changed. According to the older tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding. Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles's head for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged-and nobly enough, Heaven knows! from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary Norway. "Underbred" is very likely too strong a word; yet one does see how