Recent Literature

THE place of “The Last Tournament,” among the “ Idyls of the King,” is after “ Pelleas and Ettarre,” following this with a further revelation of the corruption of Arthur’s knights, and drearily foreshadowing the ruin felt in “ Guinevere.” Arthur has ordered a tournament to contend for the necklace of “the maiden babe” that Arthur found in an eagle’s nest, and that the queen took for her own, but that died :

But the day before the tourney a maimed and mutilated churl appears before the king and tells him that his cruel hurts have come from a robber-baron of the North ; and Arthur leaves Lancelot to rule the tourney and goes to punish the robber. The prize is won by Tristram, who carries the jewels of the dead innocence to deck very lively guilt, — to hang about the neck of Isolt, his paramour ; and as he clasps them there,

and her husband cleaves him through the brain.

The queen has flown with Lancelot, and what comes next is in “ Guinevere,” without full reference to which this idyl cannot be quite satisfactorily read. In some lights it seems the slightest of all the idyls, but it gathers substance as the reader considers it, and when taken in its due relation to the rest, we doubt if it will be found the least. There is no great painting as in “ Pelleas,” and it wants the novelty of note which ravished in the earlier idyls ; but in the art of subtly simple narration, which characterizes the whole series of poems, we think it is almost the first. So many things are so delicately yet clearly shown in the dreamful air of the time that never was, and the whole scene and action are made so present to the fancy, that if it were only all new, what a wonder and a rapture it would all be ! The old fabulous Arthurian capital, clothed for the tourney, its streets “ Hung with folds of pure

White samite,”

and its “ fountains running wine ” ; Lancelot sitting heavy-hearted, absent-minded at the lists in the good king’s “ double-drag - oned chair”; Tristram entering,

the sorrowful rain and the wet plumes and mantles ; the after-revels, at which dame and damsel cast the simple white they had worn at the tourney in honor of “ the dead innocence,” and wantoned forth in all colors,

little Dagonet, the king’s fool, with Tristram in the wood, and the musical, airy prolixity of their talk, and Tristram’s rhythmical, unrhymed song thereto ; Tristram’s dream in the ruined forest bower, and his riding forward to Tintagil under “an evershowering leaf” ; Arthur’s slaughter of the Red Knight and all his comrades and their paramours in the North ; — these things we read with a quiet sense of their expectedness even when we most admire them ; and several of the passages really are of the best Tennyson : —

That it is not new in feeling ought hardly to count against the poem, seeing that it is part in temper and mood of an enterprise already old. Perhaps it is to be praised for preserving so perfectly the atmosphere of the other idyls. Familiar, at any rate, it certainly is, in every mien and attitude, —in its supreme and predominant gracefulness ; in its grand-operatic violences, its impulses that wait upon the music; its comfortable unreality, — so com-

fortable that we behold any wickedness and sorrow the poet will with a gentle motion of the sympathies that is regret, and scarcely know if it be disapproval. The bloodshed is decent, the outrage graceful, the adulteries do not stain, the tears have no savor of bitter or of salt. It is a fair, stately world of revery in which we live while we read the idyls of Tennyson ; we do not like to come out of it; and while there we think it a pity that such a world could not have been once. When time shall have done as much for these poems as it has done for Guarini’s Pastor Fido or Tasso’s Aminta, will the reader, may be, derive the same sort of pleasure from them all? Does he now? And if something wholly outside of experience or possibility can give us pleasure, shall we complain of it ? If ever we do, may we read realities that weary us !

Like the “ Last Tournament,” Mr. Longfellow’s “Divine Tragedy” is part of a series of poems, though there is nothing to hinder the sympathetic reader’s enjoyment of this poem apart from the others. The plan of the whole work includes “The Divine Tragedy ” as the first of a dramatic trilogy; then, after an Interlude by the Abbot Joachim, “The Golden Legend,” and then, with a second Interlude by Martin Luther, “The New England Tragedies,” ending with a Finale by St. John, who, after the passion of Christ, after the mystical self-sacrifice of the mediæval asceticism, after the gloomy excesses of Puritanism in the New World, is still a wanderer on the earth, where still

And he cries : —

We need not speak of the second and third of the three dramas, except to say that they gain new meaning and force in the light of their relation to each other and to the first. As for “ The Divine Tragedy,” it is for the most part simply the life of Christ, told in the words of the Evangelists, which, with curiously few touches of art, take shape in blank verse ; but interspersing the dramatic narration are soliloquies, in which the poet has used some invention of his own, or some old legend. It is of course nearer in form to “The Golden Legend,” but the resolute simplicity of the work is more like that of “The New England Tragedies.” There is in the beginning an Introit of the Angel and of the Prophet Habbakuk, foretelling Christ, and then the first Passover (for the three acts of the Tragedy are the three passovers embraced in Christ’s ministry) opens with John’s crying in the wilderness, and answering the priest sent out to question him. Here it is almost solely the Evangelists’ words that take lyrical life and shape from the poet’s touch, but the Temptation of Christ that follows is more freely, though scarcely less simply treated. Then comes the marriage in Cana, with the first and most poetical of the miracles ; and we do not think that any part of the drama is better managed. The outline given in Scripture is so filled and lighted up that the whole scene rises before us, with the musicians singing verses from the Song of Solomon, — the bride and bridegroom uttering their love in the Old Testament phrases of mystical tenderness, — the governor of the feast and guests talking of the young Nazarene present, —

the few words that pass between Mary and her son, — the divine abstraction of Jesus in working the miracle,—and the Essenian Manahem’s vision of the Passion. At the close is one of the few passages which forcibly remind us of the poet’s earlier manner : —

But the poet has permitted himself few merely literary graces, and has made his literary art strictly servant to his reverence for his theme, exerting it to impart dramatic quality to the scenes by putting the words of the Gospel narrative as chorus-like comment into the mouth of some probable witness, or in making the Scriptural persons relate of themselves the things that are related of them, and in here and there the introduction of legendary facts or characters, as we have already said, and of some wholly imagined passages. In the first Passover the last scene is the supper in the house of Simon the Pharisee. Preceding this is the soliloquy of Mary of Magdala in her tower, — one of the imagined passages, which is characteristic of much of the grave poetry of the drama : —

In the second Passover, after Herod has consented to the beheading of John the Baptist, Manahem rushes out of the castle of Machærus, where the king sits feasting, and in a wild lyrical strain utters the vision in which he sees the great misdeed accomplished. This monologue is very fine for a prophetic fury of horror and malediction in the verse, and is worthy of the poet’s feeling that in this way only could the event be portrayed. But we think the strongest and most expressive of all the interludes, as we may call them, is the song of Barabbas to his fellow-prisoners, when he lies in prison expecting death. The character of the ruthless, fearless ruffian seems to shape the verse and to give it a reckless swagger:—

The reader, looking back upon the poem, will be more apt to do it justice than at the first glance. The simplicity will probably have seemed bare at times, and the selfdenial which has rejected from the dramatic narrative all non-scriptural persons and incidents, and has so sparingly relieved the Gospel history by the inventions of the interludes, may have been felt as too severe. A better sense of the poet’s intention ought to remove these impressions, and revision will light up the many points at which it touches the life of the time, such as Pilate’s Roman mystification at the strange religion of the Jews, and his pagan surprise at their intolerance ; the low spirit of sorcery, almost self-believing, in Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre, seeking out Christ to learn his magic ; the domination of the Romans, and the restive subjection of the Jews ; the wandering career, the apparition and the disappearance of Christ in divers places; the bewilderment and uncertain knowledge of his own disciples concerning him ; the feverish tumult of expectation and disappointment in the minds of the Jewish rulers ; the apparent end of all his mission in Christ’s death ; and the strange, dreamlike aspect of the events of his appearance after death. But these are really points only; there is a peculiar unrest in the poem, which lets it dwell upon no fact with extraordinary fulness ; it hastens forward to the most tragic of all tragic ends. You must turn back, as we have said, for its true effects, and in this review you will most enjoy the tender and vivid

passages in it. The whole soliloquy of Judas is full of pathos, with nothing more pathetic than his cry, —

“ Why did I not perish With those by Herod slain, the innocent children Who went with playthings in their little hands Into the darkness of the other world, As if to bed ?”

Helen’s all-Eastern homesickness for Tyre, —

the touchingly patient cheerfulness of blind Bartimeus, and the excellent art with which the scene of his healing is done, are parts of the poem that have constantly grown upon our liking.

The first volume of Mr. Forster’s “ Life of Dickens ” is probably making more people talk of it at present than any other book, and in substance it is one of the most remarkable biographies ever written. It is not so surprising, however, as it is interesting, to know that many of the most famous passages of Dickens’s romances are personal history, with little or no disguise of circumstance or other invention; for there has been rumor of all this before, and now we are chiefly struck with the fulness and faithfulness with which the author’s own experiences were reproduced. It was said long ago that Mr. Micawber was drawn from Dickens’s father ; but now the veil is wholly lifted, and we see that Mr. Micawber was the elder Dickens, not in character alone, but in the principal incidents of his amusing career. The continual struggle with bad luck, the shabby devices for eking out a genteel existence, the repeated compromises with creditors, the final crash, and the sojourn in the debtors’ prison, and then the court of bankruptcy, — not only were these facts common to the career of Micawber and the elder Dickens, but also such small matters as the petition of the debtors to the throne, — “not for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, as David Copperfield relates, but for the less dignified but more accessible boon of a bounty to drink his Majesty’s health on his Majesty’s forthcoming birthday,”— and that well-known financial statement by Mr. Micawber, that the difference between misery and happiness lay in the odd pence of an income overspent or underspent. In the mean time Dickens was himself the David Copperfield of that period of the story, even to his employment in the bottle warehouse, which was, in fact, the blacking manufactory of a cousin and rival of the illustrious Warren. Here, with such companionship as is described in the romance, he worked a year, for six shillings a week, at bottling the blacking. All these facts are most touchingly narrated in his own language from the notes he left for Mr. Forster’s use, and form the history of a part of his life which was always a most miserable memory to him. He declares that from the final hour of this servitude — imbittered to the sensitive boy by his early consciousness of high possibilities in himself, and his precocious shrinking from mean associations — up to the moment he wrote of it, the fact was never mentioned in his presence by any that knew it, and he himself never, in any burst of confidence, referred to it. He shunned the street where the blacking warehouse stood, and he says that “ his old way home by the borough made him cry after his eldest child could speak.” It is not easy to give a sense of the intense and passionate feeling, the suffering, with which these notes are written. After reading them, the other revelations seem of little moment, though it is well to know that the phonographic toils of David Copperfield were also those of Dickens, and that there was a real Dora, who did not die, but lived to become Flora Casby in “ Little Dorrit.”

The book is very satisfying as a literary history, and it imparts the excitement of the far times when “ Pickwick ” was a new delight, and “ Oliver Twist” began to appear before “ Pickwick ” was finished, and “Nicholas Nickleby” hurried forward by the side of “ Oliver Twist,” and “ Barnaby Rudge ” was planned, and “ The Old Curiosity Shop ” was written, and the whole world was talking of the young genius who had taken its sensibilities by storm. Mr. Forster does not attempt any critical analysis of the works whose production he describes ; it is not his office, and it appears not his forte, for the praises which he lavishes upon them are not only idle, but astonishingly commonplace. Think of his supposing it worth while to say that Dickens does not make vice attractive ! One longs to examine Mr. Forster’s bumps, after that. But he has told the story he had to tell very entertainingly; not singularly well, but, as we say, satisfyingly, yes, delightfully, as a man could hardly help doing with such material ; and we think he has only used himself with justice whenever he has touched upon his friendship with Dickens. It was a relation of which he might well be proud, for it was of uncommon tenderness and constancy ; and if Mr. Forster might be proud, Dickens on his part had rare cause to be grateful. By virtue of his abounding love for Dickens, and the thoroughly uncritical mood in which he writes of him, Dickens’s character is the more frankly made known to us. Mr. Forster does not seem to have felt the trait of exaggeration running through his whole nature and work, —for his work was himself,— and consequently does not guard against it, or try to veil it. The reader may suspect that the anguish of the boy in the blacking factory is partly the retrospective misery and self-pity of the man who remembers it; but the biographer leaves the reader alone to the enjoyment of this and other doubts, and lets his hero put himself in all his extravagance before us. A more critical friend would have hesitated to publish the expressions of transcendent tenderness in which Dickens bewails the death of his wife’s younger sister; but Mr. Forster trusts it to us, and we learn again that, however deeply Dickens felt, he must often have thought that he felt more deeply than he did feel. This trait made him the more effective with the vast multitudes he enraptured to laughter or tears; but it won him, in prodigiously greater degree, an actor’s success, and must forbid him a place with Goldsmith, and Thackeray, and Hawthorne, perhaps the only perfect artists English fiction has known.

The six chapters which end the book are given up to his American visit, and are exceedingly interesting, without being novel. The fact seems to have been simply that Dickens came here in the glow of very lively sympathies with democracy in the ideal, and was shocked and outraged by the vulgarity, the vanity, the dulness, the timidity which belong to the American, as well as to all human experiments, whether in republicanism or monarchy. His letters do full justice to the good qualities of that curiously provincial and happily obsolete American people of thirty years ago, while they do not spare their conceit and pretentiousness, their self-seeking even in the honors they bestowed, and their now-incredible meanness in the presence of great wrongs, their intolerance, their ignorance. He was horribly fatigued and bored; but on the whole we meant well, and perhaps he meant well in the “ American Notes.” If he did not, it must be owned that he was sorely tempted to evil. His judgment of us was superficially correct, and profoundly mistaken; but it was not dishonest, we believe, however ungracious it was.

This part of the life of Dickens must awaken the doubt which we suppose most serious people feel concerning the value of all judgments of a nation by critics outside of itself. A humorist like Dickens, whose celebrity amongst us came from our love of humor, could declare that we had no sense of it ; and he was a man of our own race, religion, and domestic, if not social and political traditions. Such a misconception goes near to make one sad, and one has no heart for his revenge when he takes up the all-too-vivid Monsieur Taine’s History of English Literature, and reads there the sparkling errors of that ingenious gentleman about Dickens and Thackeray and the society that produced them. No doubt troubles M. Taine, who flashes his jack-alantern over the boggy ups and downs of English life, and upon the pages of the great romancer and the great satirist, with a lively belief in its solar power. We speak slightly now of only a small part of a large work, which may have more value than we have been led to hope by what we have read in it. If the suspicion which our partial acquaintance has cast upon the whole proves unjust, we shall be prepared to make full amends hereafter ; but in the mean time we own our misgiving. In treating of the remoter literary epochs, M. Taine has us more on his own ground, for our ancestors are a kind of foreigners to us ; yet if we may guess from his criticism on Dryden, which we have read, wc must still prefer a critic who has not had to judge his author with all his finest and his sweetest left out. It is not so much that he is mainly mistaken ; Dryden is rather too plain a case ; but if any one will read Mr. Lowell’s essay on Dryden after M. Taine’s, he will have our meaning, and will perceive the difference between interpreting a poet by every delicate faculty, and feeling for him with the thumb. Still, one has to admire M. Taine’s zeal and industry, and the strictly historical portions of his work. He succeeds better, we think, in relating the history of a foreign people to its art, as in his “ Art in Greece,” than to its literature ; but his success there may be chiefly in our necessary modern ignorance of antiquity, and, if they could, those poor ancients might cry out in indignant protest. It is certain that it is safer to infer Greek art from Greek life, as M. Taine does, than to infer Greek character from Greek art, as Mr. Ruskin would prefer to do. His method of showing the influences of daily life upon art is admirably brilliant and effective, but the reader will do well to guard himself against the author’s too inflexible and exclusive application of his theory. Stated in rather an extreme form, it is this: given the time and climate of a people, their art can be accurately deduced therefrom, without reference to their artistic productions,— just as Agassiz can sketch you off a portrait of our affectionate forefathers the ichthyosaurus or the pterodactyl, after glancing at their fossilized foot-tracks. M. Taine’s method does not take into sufficient account the element of individuality in the artist. Rigorously applied, it would make us expect to find all the artists of a given people at a given time cast in one mould, good or bad as the case might be. In the history of art it should be borne in mind that, beside the study of works of art proper, not only the general circumstances of the time and people are to be considered, but the personal circumstances of each great artist, — his obstacles and aids, his failures and triumphs, which modify the character of his works. Each study should supplement the other two. By following these three paths seriatim, among every people in every period, and comparing the results, we arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of the world’s art. In respect to Greece, the study of biography and of art-products is, of course, mainly out of the question, from the absence of material. But in the study of modern art, it should always be remembered that M. Taine’s method is only one side of a complete view. Much gratitude, however, is due him for his valuable contributions to one portion of the science of art-history.

Mr. Fairbanks, in his history of Florida, has not felt that dearth of material which must trouble the historians of most of our States, and he has made an interesting book, of which no part is more attractive than that devoted to the early discoverers and explorers, one of whom (Cabeza de Vaca) he believes to have discovered the Mississippi before De Soto. Through three chapters we trace the history of Ribaut and Landonnière, the commanders of the Huguenot settlements, Forts Charles and Caroline ; and there is a narrative of Dominique de Gourgues, the avenger of the massacre of Ribaut and his followers. The historian dwells upon the curious fact that the son of Melendez, the murderer of these Huguenots, had been shipwrecked on the passage from Mexico to Spain, and taken captive by the Indians of the Bermudas, so that one of the chief motives of the father in coming to America, where his cruelties were committed, must have been the affectionate desire to rescue his son. He was a man admirable, in spite of his atrocious crime, for heroic perseverance and daring. Mr. Fairbanks tells us that Melendez, “within the eighteen months that had elapsed since his landing in Florida, had carefully examined the entire coast from Cape Florida to St. Helena, had built forts at St. Augustine, San Mateo, Avista, Guale, and St. Helena, and had established block-houses at Tequesta, Carlos, Tocobayo, and Coava, in all of which he had left garrisons and religious teachers.”

A curious episode of Florida history was the enterprise of Sir William Duncan and Dr. Andrew Turnbull, who, at an expense of one hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, brought from Smyrna, under indentures, fifteen hundred Greeks, Italians, and Minocans, who formed a settlement at Mosquito and called it New Smyrna. This colony proving a failure, in about nine years the six hundred that remained went in 1776 to St. Augustine, where their descendants are still found. The last four chapters of the history are devoted to the Seminole or Florida War,—that conflict in which a comparatively few Indians contrived to elude the strength and skill of our forces for nearly seven years, and in whose subjugation the sum of forty million dollars was expended.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

The most interesting as well as the most important of the new foreign books we are to notice this month is Otto Ludwig’s Shakespeare-Studien. And studies exactly defines the informal nature of the book. It consists of a series of disconnected observations on Shakespeare, poetry, and the drama, as well as the thousand various matters which naturally suggest themselves to one who is seriously considering such complex subjects. On one page we find the analysis of some particular play of Shakespeare’s followed by some criticism ofGoethe or Schiller, then a brief dissertation on some matter of æsthetics ; and all done as simply and unpretentiously as one who only writes for himself is more likely to do than he who makes books for the instruction of his fellow-men. These notes have all the simplicity of conversation ; again, they are put in chronological order, so that we can watch the growth of the author’s mind from year to year. On the whole, the book is as sound a manual of criticism as we have seen for a long time. Shakespeare has been for a long time adored by the Germans, but at times a vein of mysticism has entered into their worship. Ludwig, however, keeps a cool head even in his greatest enthusiasm, and his admirable criticism of Schiller and other German idols is all the more precious for coming from one of their own countrymen. As an example of the simplicity and condensation of the book, we quote the following ; it is called “ The Cosmos of the Plays of Shakespeare”: " What we find in Shakespeare is the world, but freed from the contradictions which we find in the actual world ; one of which the most secret motives lie before our eyes ; we see through the people as if they were spirits ; we see, too, their right, their wrong, their whole nature, and their fate in its necessary sequence ; we see nothing that could make us doubt of the wisdom of the order of the world. His world is a school

for the actual one, it teaches us how every sort of excess and perversion, every discord in the harmony of our powers, brings its own punishment; it shows how the wicked man, in his apparent triumph, bears hell in his heart, etc. He is his own organism, not a mechanism, like Lessing in his Emilia Galotte, or like the French classic tragedians, with whom one fact demands another, as in a game of cards or chess which goes on piece by piece, move by move, until we have at last only a frosty symmetry, hardly more than superficial. He is without oversubtlety, he works from one or two primitive and self-evident motives ; if they are two, they are approved to one another. Shakespeare has never made it as easy for himself as Goethe has done, for example, in his ‘ Tasso.’ In order to inform us that his hero is a great poet, he gives him the name of a great poet, and to Antonio he gives the name of a statesman. Without this testimony, he would never appear to us as a great statesman ; we see nothing of the kind in him; on the contrary, he is as powerless over himself as is Tasso. What we see is only two vain, sensitive men. When Shakespeare shows us a Coriolanus, he does not need the name and historical identification. We see that he is high-minded to excess ; that he is a mighty hero, who, after he has conquered the others, conquers himself, the stoutest of all. Shakespeare does not suppose any further belief than what our senses and understanding can find or prove. The name of his heroes is indifferent, — Coriolanus might be called Tullius or what you please, he would remain what he is, and we should see what he is. Give Tasso and Alphonso other names, and let us know nothing more about them than what we see, and they would sink greatly in our opinion.”

Of Schiller he says : “ The main difference between Shakespeare and Schiller is this, that with the former the inner development is the chief thing, and the external tragedy, i. e. the action, appears as the necessary consequence, and at the same time as the symbolic expression of the inner development; while with Schiller just the contrary is true. With him the external facts are the main point, they are the acting characters ; the hero is passive, he suffers not the consequences of his own actions, which avenge themselves upon him, but rather he suffers without fault of his own ; fate is changed into accident ; the divine order into a relentlessly cruel force of nature, which takes a malicious pleasure in trampling what is beautiful in the dust, in degrading what is noble. Chance directs the inner conduct of the play, the external action is the result of necessity. Thus his heroes are in a very bad way, dramatically, since the other characters monopolize all the action ; they have nothing to do, except to maintain their dignity. Hence they are truly enough the heroes, but not the principal characters.” This is a theme to which Ludwig is continually returning, illustrating and emphasizing it in a thousand ways. We have not space for more extracts; we can only recommend the volume most heartily.

Gutzkow’s new novel Fritz Ellrodt, of which two volumes have already appeared, but which still lacks one to be completed, is not of entrancing interest. It is an historical novel, in which the history appears to be thoroughly accurate ; the story itself, as far as we have read, is rather dull. It might be well for one who hopes that these sketches may put the reader in the way of getting hold of some entertaining reading seriously to forswear the mention of any German novels; at any rate, the one we have mentioned is only noteworthy on account of its novelty, — there is nothing else about it which could tempt us to break so agreeable a rule. A short poem, Der neue Tannhäuser, which appeared last summer, is not without merit. It is the wail of the modern, introspective Tannhäuser, who poisons every joy by trying to determine its real place in the universe, and on whose lips, in consequence, worldly pleasures soon turn to dust and ashes. This is not the best subject in the world, nor yet one that recommends it to universal reading, but while there is much that is tiresome in the treatment of it, there is somewhat that is really good. The last scene in the book, where Faust, Helena, and the Wandering Jew appear, is well worth reading, it is really poetical. The characters introduced are not easily made dull.

Of French books we have but few, except those about the war ; of these there are M. Paul de Saint Victor’s La Prusse et la Commune, a most hysterical production, and two volumes by M. Louis Veuillot, which we hope to mention again next month. L'Histoire d'un Sous-Maitre, by MM. ErckmannChatrian, which came out in the Revue since the war, has appeared in book form, and, like everything by these authors, is deserving of all praise. A new novel by M. Gaborian, La Clique Dorée, is not without interest,and may be taken as a very good specimen of its author’s curious power. All of his books are intricate developments of some plot which generally involves the breaking of all the Ten Commandments in turn. But there are none which can be read with calmer pulse than those of just this sort. We can be at the most exciting point, where the hero, who has been languishing in a protracted fever, flies just in time from a burning house and seeks repose in the branches of the deadly upas-tree ; two savages are aiming their poisoned arrows at him, his deadliest foe is loading his rifle behind a neighboring rock, a waterfall is roaring beneath him. there is a lion by the side of the tree, a large serpent is making its way towards him,—but we can lay the book aside and go to dinner without impatience ; we are sure that M. Gaborian will take the best of care of him and give him the bride and all the money he wants at the end of the book. Others of his stories are less full of incident than La Clique Dorée, which at times reminds us of one of Mayne Reid’s stories grown up. This novel is the history of an adventuress who takes the name of a prominent Philadelphia belle who died abroad. She comes to America and mingles in la haute société de la Philadelphie, without exciting any suspicion in that rather particular city. On the whole, however, the book is readable and not too much exaggerated. One cannot expect stories of this kind to be more than a combination of startling possibilities.

L'Autriche-Hongrie, by M. Daniel Lévy, is a valuable work and full of information on a country about which one can be very ignorant without being any less a worthy citizen and respectable member of a family. The Récits d'un Soldat, by Amédée Achard, who seems to be a sort of literary godfather to various anonymous writings, contains two interesting sketches, of the surrender at Sedan, and of the campaign before Paris, written by an eyewitness. They had already appeared in the Revue.