them over with the young ladies whom we seem to have been always calling upon. I remember those years in Columbus as among the happiest years of my life.

Boyesen. From Columbus you went as consul to Venice, did not you?

Howells. Yes. You remember I had written a campaign “Life of Lincoln.” I was, like my father, an ardent Anti-slavery man. I went myself to Washington soon after President Lincoln’s inauguration. I was first offered the consulate to Rome; but as it depended entirely upon perquisites, which amounted only to three or four hundred dollars a year, I declined it, and they gave me Venice. The salary was raised to fifteen hundred dollars, which seemed to me quite beyond the dreams of avarice.

Boyesen. Do not you regard that Venetian experience as a very valuable one?

Howells. Oh, of course. In the first place, it gave me four years of almost uninterrupted leisure for study and literary work. There was, to be sure, occasionally an invoice to be verified, but that did not take much time. Secondly, it gave me a wider outlook upon the world than I had hitherto had. Without much study of a systematic kind, I had acquired a notion of English, French, German, and Spanish literature. I had been an eager and constant reader, always guided in my choice of books by my own inclination. I had learned German. Now, my first task was to learn Italian; and one of my early teachers was a Venetian priest, whom I read Dante with. This priest in certain ways suggested Don Ippolito in “A Foregone Conclusion.”

Boyesen. Then he took snuff, and had a supernumerary calico handkerchief?

Howells. Yes. But what interested me most about him was his religious skepticism. He used to say, “The saints are the gods baptized.” Then he was a kind of baffled inventor; though whether his inventions had the least merit I was unable to determine.

Boyesen. But his love story?

Howells. That was wholly fictitious.

Boyesen. I remember you gave me, in 1874, a letter of introduction to a Venetian friend of yours, named Brunetta, whom I failed to find.

Howells. Yes, Brunetta was the first friend I had in Venice. He was a distinctly Latin character—sober, well-regulated, and probity itself.

Boyesen. Do you call that the Latin character?

Howells. It is not our conventional idea of it; but it is fully as characteristic, if not more so, than the light, 7 mercurial, pleasure-loving type which somehow in literature has displaced the other. Brunetta and I promptly made the discovery that we were congenial. Then we became daily companions. I had a number of other Italian friends too, full of beautiful bonhomie and Southern sweetness of temperament.

Boyesen. You must have acquired Italian in a very short time?

Howells. Yes; being domesticated in that way in the very heart of that Italy, which was then Italia irridente, I could not help steeping myself in its atmosphere and breathing in the language, with the rest of its very composite flavors.

Boyesen. Yes; and whatever I know of Italian literature I owe largely to the completeness of that soaking process of yours. Your book on the Italian poets is one of the most charmingly sympathetic and illuminative bits of criticism that I know.

Howells. I am glad you think so; but the book was never a popular success. Of all the Italian authors, the one I delighted in the most was Goldoni. His exquisite realism fascinated me. It was the sort of thing which I felt I ought not to like; but for all that I liked it immensely.

Boyesen. How do you mean that you ought not to like it?

Howells. Why, I was an idealist in those days. I was only twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and I knew the world chiefly through literature. I was all the time trying to see things as others had seen them, and I had a notion that, in literature, persons and things should be nobler and better than they are in the sordid reality; and this romantic glamour veiled the world to me, and kept me from seeing things as they are. But in the lanes and alleys of Venice I found Goldoni everywhere. Scenes from his plays were enacted before my eyes, with all the charming Southern vividness of speech and gesture, and I seemed at every turn to have stepped at unawares into one of his comedies. I believe this was the beginning of my revolt. But it was a good while yet before I found my own bearings.

Boyesen. But permit me to say that it was an exquisitely delicate set of fresh Western senses you brought with you to Venice. When I was in Venice in 1878, I could not get away from you, however much I tried. I saw your old Venetian senator, in his august rags, roasting coffee; and I promenaded about for days in the chapters of your “Venetian Life,” like the Knight Huldbrand, in the Enchanted Forest in “Undine,” and I could not find my way out. Of course, I know that, being what you were, you could not have helped writing that book, but what was the immediate cause of your writing it?

Howells. From the day I arrived in Venice I kept a journal in which I noted down my impressions. I found a young pleasure in registering my sensations at the sight of notable things, and literary reminiscences usually shimmered through my observations. Then I received an offer from the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” to write weekly or bi-weekly letters, for which they paid me five dollars, in greenbacks, a column, nonpareil. By the time this sum reached Venice, shaven 8 and shorn by discounts for exchange in gold premium, it had usually shrunk to half its size or less. Still I was glad enough to get even that, and I kept on writing joyously. So the book grew in my hands until, at the time I resigned in 1865, I was trying to have it published. I offered it successively to a number of English publishers; but they all declined it. At last Mr. Trübner agreed to take it, if I could guarantee the sale of five hundred copies in the United States, or induce an American publisher to buy that number of copies in sheets. I happened to cross the ocean with Mr. Hurd of the New York firm of Hurd & Houghton, and repeated Mr. Trübner’s proposition to him. He refused to commit himself; but some weeks after my arrival in New York, he told me that the risk was practically nothing at all, and that his firm would agree to take the five hundred copies. The book was an instant success. I don’t know how many editions of it have been printed, but I should say that its sale has been upward of forty thousand copies, and it still continues. The English weeklies gave me long complimentary notices, which I carried about for months in my pocket like love-letters, and read surreptitiously at odd moments. I thought it was curious that other people to whom I showed the reviews did not seem much interested.

Boyesen. After returning to this country, did not you settle down in New York?

Howells. Yes; I