Howells

task of learning the typesetter's art He was so
illiterate that printers taught him how to divide
words into syllables. The hand-set pages of type
were carried, a few at a time, from his little vil-
lage of Clackamas into Portland and put upon
a power press; and thus was slowly and painfully
finished, from 1897 to 1903, his Flora of North-
west America. Woodsman and mountaineer that
he was and lacking scholarly facility with a pen,
he wrote few of the descriptions, so that the work
unfortunately contains too little of his own field
knowledge. He was indeed almost unlearned in
English spelling though he erred less frequently
in Latin words. Although thus handicapped, he
had a sound and just comprehension of what was
needed, and he organized diagnoses of genera
and species scattered in the works of many
writers into a pioneer flora, which, considering
the circumstances of its production^ is balanced,
judicious, and highly useful. Even after more
than a quarter of a century it remains the only
flora for the three states which it covers.

In the woods and fields Howell was entirely
at home, but his nature did not protect him from
city sharpers, who robbed him of his inheritance.
It was not until he was fifty that he married Effie
(Hudson) Mcllwane, a widow. Simple in man-
ner, unaffected in speech, of few wants, but of
great capacity for fortitude, he asked little of the
world. His death occurred at Portland, Ore.

[Few men leaving a durable contribution to American
botany have led so obscure an existence as did Howell.
Am. Men of Sci. (1906) gives him three scant lines.
Certain essential facts have been recorded by C S. Sar-
gent, The Silva of North America, vol. XII (1898).
This sketch is based in great part on manuscript sources,
especially the Jepson Field Book (vol. VII, pp. 108-10
and vol. XVI, pp. 86-88); see also Botanical Gazette,
June 1913.] W.L.J—n.

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (Mar. i,
i837-May n, 1920), novelist, leader of Ameri-
can letters for the quarter-century ending in
1920, was born at Martin's Ferry, Belmont Coun-
ty, Ohio. His ancestry was mixed, a Welsh in-
gredient predominating strongly on his father's
side and Pennsylvania German on his mother's.
An English great-grandmother sobered the
Welsh ferment; an Irish grandfather (mother's
father) aerated the Teutonic phlegm. The Welsh
ancestors made clocks and watches; afterwards
they turned to flannels, which, becoming profit-
able and famous, found a market in shivering
America. To that land, as visitors and emigrants,
the flannel-makers gradually followed their prod-
uct, and in a new world, not always generous to
merit, they wandered, ventured, and lost money
for two unquiet generations. The novelist's fa-
ther, William Cooper Howells, was a migratory,
ill-paid, anti-slavery journalist in Ohio, and had

Howells

little to share with his cherished second son but
a scant dole of bread, high principle, a buoyant
and indomitable humor, and a liking and capacity
for letters. He was a Quaker who turned Swe-
denborgian. In 1831 he married Mary Dean, a
woman in whom an Irish warmth of temper
mingled with a more than German warmth of
heart, and who needed all her German birthright
of thrift and patience to rear eight children on
the thousand dollars, more or less, which was
Ohio's rating of the yearly value of an editor's
services to the commonwealth.

At the age of nine the boy William was setting
type in his father's printing-office; for years the
family profited by his skill. Meanwhile he gave
his leisure to a strenuous and passionate self-
discipline in letters in a windowed nook behind
the stairs in a home where literature was repre-
sented by the contents of a single bookcase.
From the start he wished to write; he read de-
voutly, and imitated his divinities with an ardor
which is touchingly reflected in My Literary
Passions (1895). This double diligence, me-
chanical in the printing-office, enthusiastic in the
study, had much to do with the steadiness and
abundance of the outflow from his maturer pen.
In the scant leisure that remained he found time
for not a little healthy, boyish sport (see A Botfs
Town> 1890), and for fraternization—genuine, if
partial—with the ingenuous, but manly and
wholesomely democratic, life of primitive Ohio.
Something proud, delicate, and shy in the lad
made terms with a fortunate capacity for mixing
freely and humanly with all sorts and conditions
of men, a capacity that was the seed of a realism
to which everything in everybody was finally to
become interesting.

Office, study, and playground cut down the
time for school, and the slightness of his formal
schooling would have made eminence in litera-
ture impossible to any less self-reliant and self-
sustaining temper. The man who was to receive
honorary degrees from six universities, includ-
ing Oxford, and to reject offers of professorships
in literature from Yale, Harvard, and Johns
Hopkins attended neither university nor high
school; he went to common school when he could,
and coaxed a little help in foreign tongues from
inexpert or desultory tutors. In boyhood he
studied Latin, German, Spanish; in manhood he
knew some French, and acquired efficiency, if not
proficiency, in Italian. Technically, he mastered
no language, and he mastered no literature, not
even English, in the scholar's narrowly exacting
sense; but his assimilations in,these fields were
extensive and genuine, and, curiously enough,
the flexibility in which the self-taught man is

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