Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/141

 Charles Dudley Warner 123 the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal." The relationship of parents to children, and the nature of child- hood itself; the servant question; matters of house decoration; the inherited predilections of Aunt Mehitable, with her "scru- pulous lustrations of every pane of glass"; discussions con- cerning education, hospitality, pastimes ; helpful considerations regarding the temptations that assail human nature, are all mingled in a sane atmosphere of simplicity and true worth which embraces, but in no Puritan spirit, the quietly heroical approach to life, the desire not only to enjoy but the willing- ness also "to encounter labour and sacrifice." It was Mrs. Stowe's famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher,' who introduced to the world of letters the most likable of all the later American essayists, Charles Dudley Warner (1829- 1900), when, in 1870, Beecher wrote the preface to Warner's first book, My Summer in a Garden. In these papers, as in his Saunterings (1872), based on European travels, and his Back- log Studies (1873), there are a genial humour and a grace of style decidedly reminiscent of Washington Irving, whose life Warner was later to write in a most sympathetic way. In the long course of his lectures and essays we find many stimulating appeals for greater personal and national culture, and helpful discussions in the field of social topics, especially in connection with prison reform. His travel essays, recording adventures and observations in Europe and America, Africa and Asia, are enjoyable additions to this branch of our literature; while Warner's activities as an abolitionist bring him further into touch with his fellow writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. He, more than any other of the later essayists, affected his lesser contemporaries of the pen. His papers, with their fireside warmth, their sketchy touch, their humorous and intimate personal note, were studied by many writers for magazines and newspapers, a host of commonplace scribes who found it easier to imitate the Warner flavour than to create any original atmosphere in their own writings. For a dehcious example of Warner's style one might turn to that part of My Summer in a Garden where the adult agri- culturist has an entirely ordinary experience in which his labours are set at naught by the universal characteristics of ■ See Book II, Chap. xxii.