IN "The Boyhood of Living Authors" Mr. Rideing has called our attention to one of the most pleasant features of literary life and character. After reading his "Boys Coastwise" and his "Boys in the Mountains and on the Plains," we are quite prepared to regard him as an authority on boys, a sagacious student of human nature in its first forms. The special interest of the volume before us lies in its distinctively literary type, and in the fact that the authors discussed are living and moving among us. With but two or three exceptions, moreover, the eighteen names presented are American, and for this reason, if for no other, commend themselves to all lovers of home talent in letters. No better method of awakening an early taste for books and writers could be devised than that of placing such sketches as these in the hands of our American youth. They have all the reality of biography and enough of the romance of the unreal to attract and fascinate. If such historical portraitures at times discourage us by their disclosure of youthful skill and success in authorship, they far more frequently stimulate and quicken us by their revelation of the trials and failures of our best writers in their first literary attempts. Written in a racy, cheerful, and readable style, they furnish alike a storehouse of useful information on the topics treated and a good example of facile, practical, and tasteful English.
Which of the several sketches is the most suggestive, or what particular incidents in the boyhood of any one author are the most characteristic, it would be difficult to decide. Of Doctor Holmes we learn, as of so many others, that he was early fond of literary reading, and in his youthful production, "The Height of the Ridiculous," prefigured his ability in the line of humor. In Mr. Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy, we find some autobiographical confessions which it would be well for boys now living to peruse. Mr. Gladstone's career from Eton to Oxford, and on to the English Parliament, reads like a romance. Mr. Eggleston tells us that the authors who helped him most were Franklin, Irving, Pope, and Milton. With Whittier, the farmer's boy, literature was what it was with Bums—an impulse and a passion. In Mr. Howells's life, from his humble birth to his present literary fame, some of the best elements of his Celtic-Teutonic ancestry are visible. In Mr. Stockton's boyish fondness for stories and harmless mischief there is found much of the explanation of his present success in romance. Mr. Lowell's desertion of law for letters has been an invaluable blessing to our national authorship. Mr. Stedman, the, able critic of English and American verse, is even now aiming to realize the early advice of his honored mother——"My son, be a poet;" while in Mr. Warner's selection, when a boy, of Irving as a model, we mark the sufficient reason of his facile English style.
These sketches from life are thus replete with timely teaching as to the relation of industry to genius; of literary reading to literary taste and effect; of an author's boyhood to his earlier and later manhood; and of personal character to personal culture and influence. As a law, it is as true in literature as it is elsewhere that "the child is father of the man." Those cases are historically rare, and happily so, in which high success in authorship has been achieved in later life quite apart from literary antecedents, early literary associations, and a good degree of innate literary impulse. When such an impulse early takes the form of what Wordsworth has called "a passionate intuition," the very highest results in literary expression may be expected.
–The Princeton Review [1888]