Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

THE MIDDLE A GES
and lavish creations. Part of a letter dated October 9,
1903, from Mr. Thomas B. Wells, the present editor of
Harper's Magazine, in which most of these pictures were
published-the management of the Harper house had undergone radical changes in the two or three preceding
years-best shows the appreciation with which they were
greeted. He refers to some paintings for the story "The~
Stairway of Honor" by Maud Stepney Rawson:
"I have wondered so often at the beauty of your work
and have always felt so great an enthusiasm for it, that it
is difficult for me to say more of these particular pictures
than I have said of others. Yet they do seem to me by far
the most beautiful, the most sympathetic and the most lively
illustrative pictures that you have done. They offer ample
evidence in every way of the great care which you say you
have put into their making. Such pictures give a true,
artistic distinction to the magazine-and that is what we
are all striving for.
"Mr. Duneka is quite as enthusiastic over the pictures as
I am and has asked me to express to you his great appreciation of them. He was particularly pleased with your interpretation of the heroine, combining as it does real,
womanly beauty with a thoroughly artistic treatment.. 607
This enthusiasm on the part of Harpers, interpreting as
it did the feeling of the reading public, was an expression of
the great interest in romance which was so prevalent in the
early years of the twentieth century, an interest which had
been largely created by Maurice Hewlett, Stanley Weyman,
and others, to which the vogue of Stevenson had added
power, and which had in popularity almost obscured the
valiant efforts for realism made by William Dean Howells
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