Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of "The Ambassadors," which first appeared intwelve numbers of The North American Review (1903) and was published as a whole the same year.The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for thereader's benefit, into as few words as possible-planted or "sunk," stiffly and saliently, in the centreof the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sorthave sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The wholecase, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoonin Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend's enlightenment, to thecharming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hourof such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express itfor us as neatly as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essenceof "The Ambassadors," his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the full-blownflower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. "Live all you can; it's amistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. Ifyou haven't had that what have you had? I'm too old-too old at any rate for what I see. What oneloses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid ortoo intelligent to have it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like solong as you don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!" Such is the gist of Strether's appeal to theimpressed youth, whom he likes and whom he desires to befriend; the word "mistake" occursseveral times, it will be seen, in the course of his remarks-which gives the measure of the signalwarning he feels attached to his case. He has accordingly missed too much, though perhaps after allconstitutionally qualified for a better part, and he wakes up to it in conditions that press the springof a terrible question. Would there yet perhaps be time for reparation?-reparation, that is, for theinjury done his character; for the affront, he is quite ready to say, so stupidly put upon it and inwhich he has even himself had so clumsy a hand? The answer to which is that he now at all eventssees; so that the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the precious moral ofeverything, is just my demonstration of this process of visio