in his fugitive contact with our American ticket taker or conductor. Acclimated, naturalized, and settled for life in a grove of eucalyptus by the bay of Monterey, he still retained a distinction amid all 'the exotic color of the coast. Walking the streets of an Indiana village in wartime, he would have been brought to the attention of the vigilance committee as a suspicious alien.
But let us turn from "the man himself" to his self-presentment in literature. Since a foreign language puts an unmistakable mark on any style, our comparison must necessarily be confined to English and American writers. And we may fairly ask, to begin with, whether our transmarine relatives have themselves a literary style that is recognizably English. When William James met in our journals with an article, by an unknown hand, which particularly pleased him, it was, one regrets to reveal, almost customary with him to write in and inquire whether it was by an Englishman. He had a notion, it appears, that certain types of writing are definitely classifiable as not-American. He was probably right.
The following passage on public life, for example, has no contemporary American mark upon it. Possibly it might have been felt by Roosevelt in some rare interval of serenity. It could hardly have been written by any American later than John Adams. It is actually marked by its breadth and elevation and still more strongly by its balance and discrimination and by its logical and stylistic con-
