Recent Literature

NOTHING could be handier to say than that Mr. Aldrich’s strength is in writing short stories : that follows with such fascinating obviousness from the fact that he has written them successfully! But this convenient criticism is not the whole truth, for in Prudence Palfrey he has shown the same skill in maneuvering his figures on the ample field of a novel that entertained us in such miniature romances as Marjorie Daw and Mademoiselle Zabriski. Indeed, if the public, — which does not like to have an author do two things well, and is fond of saying that one had better stick to his verse or his prose, or his essays or his sketches, or his short stories or his long stories, when he tries to please in a new way, — if the public would reflect (it is asking a good deal), we think it must own that Mr. Aldrich has fairly earned the right hereafter to please it as he pleases. Perhaps the public has read his new romance with too great expectation of being duped, at the end, and has done him the injustice of looking for a lighter effect than he intended; something of the sort was inevitable from its past experience of him; but we believe he would rather value himself upon the success with which he consistently works out the character of Dillingham, than on surprising the reader finally with the fact that Dillingham and Nevins are the same. Call that rogue by either name, he is the finest and firmest figure in the story; and we think he is better as Nevins than as Dillingham. The glimpses we get of him in the mining camp suggest a personage that we should like to know better in his proper quality of rascal; and those scenes in the far West seem fresher than the passages of life at Rivermouth : it may be that in the atmosphere of clerical delinquency we do not get quite away from the stories of Dr. Holmes, which deal with like sinners. Mr. Aldrich is apt, if anything, to be over-literary, to see life through a well-selected library window; but he has broken a whole sash in getting a look into the western mountains, and has made so strong a sketch of the place and people that we wish in his next story he would step quite out of doors.

Very likely it is because New England village-life has been so often and so minutely painted that we find the people of Rivermouth somewhat conventional. At any rate they give us little surprise, in the way they are many of them presented, casually, slightly, more for the purpose of moving the story forward and of working the machinery, so to speak, than that of interesting us in them severally. This stricture will not apply to the more deliberately studied persons. Of Parson Hawkins, though he is slightly caricatured, like most of the village people, is an excellent portrait in the first and second chapters ; and the scene of the two deacons remorsefully coming to tell him of his dismissal is affectingly and humorously done. There are also flashes of witty observation that light up a whole condition of things in the good-naturedly, impudently curious village world, as when Mr. Stebluns says, “ I see Capen Chris Bell at Seth Winggins’s this mornin’; he bought that great turkey of Seth’s, and six pounds of steak right off the tender-loin. Guess he expects his brotherin-law’s family dow n from Boston.” Another condition of things, as amusing, is as wittily suggested in the comments of Sam Knnbley on the village aristocrats who are “eternally shinning up the family tree. There’s old Blydenlmrgh, who’s always perching himself on the upper branches, and hurling down the cocoa-nuts of his ancestors at common folks.”

We hardly know whether the pretty Miss Prue herself shares the defect which we have perhaps only imagined in some other Rivermouth people. After a certain time of life the reader feels towards the heroine of a romance as calmly as the upright man feels towards his neighbor’s handsome wife ; he is willing the hero should have her; audit is the rarest thing for him to he moved to impassioned covetousness about her. Miss Prudence has traits of a veritable girlhood; it is but too sadly natural that her heart should waver in its true allegiance, when she finds Dillingham at first indifferent; and then devoted, and, above all, wanted by all the other girls ! She gives you the sense of a pretty, sufficiently willful, sufficiently obedient, natural, good-hearted girl, and that is as much as one ought to ask of any neroine. John Dent is not always perfectly accounted for in his movements and delays and long Silences; but he escapes conventionality of character; he has a substance and being of his own; and he comes out freshly in the last scenes. His uncle, however, is too much like the unreally actuated uncle of comedy. Here, indeed, in the absence of due motive on the part of the elder Dent, is the weak point of the plot, and not in the imposture of Dillingham. The newspapers and the records of the law are too full of histories of successful imposture for us to say that a wolf in shepherd’s clothing might not occupy the pulpit of a New England country town half a year without being found out. Besides, certain premises must be granted the story-teller; and after all, the reader will do well to remember that a novel is not a true narrative. It is testimony in favor of the general life-like character of Mr. Aldrich’s fiction that there have been hitter complaints against him on this point. “ Dear friends,” he might make answer, “no such thing happened, but it was necessary to my scheme for your amusement that we should suppose it did. The ghost really did not walk, in Hamlet; there are no such things in nature as the three weird sisters; the two Dromios were not so like but you could tell them apart; but fiction is full of these suppositions ; and if you want to pin me down to facts, I must own that no part of my story happened : it is all make-believe from beginning to end.” And for our part we contend that in this matter he has preserved the internal harmony and proportion of his own invention : the only sort of consistency that can be fairly exacted of a romancer.

We say romancer, because in spite of the title-page, and of many aspects of a novel in setting and local circumstance, Prudence Palfrey is hardly a novel. It is told in that semi-idyllic key, into which people writing stories of New England life fall so inevitably that we sometimes think a New England novel is not possible; that our sectional civilization is too narrow, too shy, too lacking in high and strong contrasts, to afford material for the dramatic realism of that kind of fiction. Hawthorne renounced and denounced the idea of such a thing; we all know how Mr. Hale in his bright sketches immaterializes his good, honest, every-day facts; Dr. Holmes’s fictions are rather psychological studies thau novels: in fact, the New England novel does not exist. Mr. Aldrich is nearer giving it in Prudence Palfrey than anybody else, but he does not give it.

In execution his methods are still largely those of an essayist, if we may distinguish execution from construction, This was true always of Thackeray; it may be said to he true of the whole English school of fiction, in which the author of the scene permits himself to come forward and comment on the action and on things in general, and subordinate the drama to himself. Whether this is the best art or not, we must confess that its results are delightful when the author happens to be a man of singular wittiness, as Mr. Aldrich is. He in always the most charming personality in the book; we would rather hear him speak than anybody else. “ The Bannock tribe had an ugly fashion of waylaying the mail, and decorating their persons with canceled postage-stamps. . . .If Dillingham had been a centipede he could not have worn out the slippers (bestowed by the young ladies of his church) ; if he had been a hydra, he could not have made head against the study caps. . - Miss Veronica Blydenburgh, who had flirted in a highspirited way with various religious professions. ... I have encountered two or three young gentlemen in the capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who seemed to have the idea that they were killed at the battle of Bunker Hill. ... A No kept on ice for a twelvemonth could not have been colder. . . . Exit Larkin, lined with profanity,"— the book abounds in strokes of a humorous and witty fancy. Indeed, we think nothing wittier, using the word in a strict sense, has been written in this country, if we except three books of Dr. Holmes’s.

— Mr. Aldrich is an essayist of the finest New England type in his regard for literary form ; he means that every point of his work shall shine; he is a poet, writing prose with the minute carefulness of verse, and often producing the true lyrical effects in his romance. Mr. DeForest, who has recently given us The Wetherel Affair, is more in earnest about making a novel, and so far he is really the only American novelist. We have before this discussed his merits, and we shall not enlarge upon them now. His field is wide, and it is not preferably New England, though great part of the" action of The Wetherel Affair takes place in the New Yorkized section of New

England, and one of the characters — the rich old Wetherel whom the young adventurer, the Polish count, murders for his money—is a true Puritan type. This old man is the finest conception of all; he is imagined with the seriousness that gave us Colonel Kershaw in Kate Beaumont, and that goes far to neutralize a certain harsh, rank flavor to he tasted in the DeForest novels. His coldness, his sort of stony stillness of surface with the attenuated tenderness underneath, his bleak religiosity and his fine, solemn, scripturallzed phrase • ology ; his uncouth ways, — skipping the hits of chicken off his fork on to the plates of his guests, —"his unlovely excellence of character, are extremely well caught, and the portrait is full of artistic repose and mellowness. The missionary’s daughter, Nestoria, whom old Wetherel’s spendthrift, disinherited nephew falls in love with, is sweetly indicated, but she is not sufficiently moticée in her career after her lover is suspected of the murder she sees done by the count. Alice and her mother are vastly better : in fact we find them altogether admirable and true. . The mother is that reserve of sense and heart still preserving American society, and the daughter is the dashing, bright, reckless, New Yorky girl whom serious-minded Americans deplore — and marry, when they can. She is a fool by her social education, but a person of the hardest common-sense by nature; and she is charming. She will have the count, though all her friends unite in proving him a swindler ; when his bills come to her mother by mistake before the marriage, she raves, she storms in a good, honest, vulgar fashion, but she has character enough to tear the love out of her heart at one wrench — and she wants the count thrashed. The count is well drawn and not overdrawn ; so is young Wetherel, who comes to the honest Puritan stuff in himself when he falls in love on his last dollar ;— the dandification of himself and Wolverton is one of the casual bits of painting that please us in the book. Some minor persons are so good that we are sorry to have them slightly treated — Lehming, Bowder, and Miss Jones, who is quite inexcusably caricatured. In fact The Wetherel Affair, as compared with Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, and Kate Beaumont, is nothing but a superb sketch. It reads easily, however, and the interest mounts to intensity before the end, which one foresees, and it is full enough of strong, manly talent to make the fortunes of a dozen ordinary story-writers.

— Mose Evans has many of the traits which stand out in such strong relief in Mr. Baker’s former books, A Chronicle of Secession, and The New Timothy. There is the same intense localization, — the thing is southern-southwestern ; it could not possibly be mistaken for anything else, — and the life, whether humorously or tragically treated, is viewed with the same religious feeling. There is no austerity in Mr. Baker’s mood, but great earnestness and elevation. It is surprising what a grip he gets of his rugged characters; and he turns their good points to the light, and reveals their hidden tenderness with a delicate skill that none can surpass. Odd Archer, in this story, is an instance of the humane and liberal spirit of Mr. Baker’s art; the gifted and reprobate blackguard is painted in all his amusing odiousness, and yet it is never forgotten that he has a heart and a conscience, and these finally save him. A complete contrast is the other type of Southerner, General Throop. He is seen less from the outside than Mr. DeForest’s Colonel Kershaw; but he is almost as reverend and impressive; the limitations of his breeding and venerableness are as subtly indicated as those of Archer’s depravity ; he seems to us the ideal “ hightoned Southern gentleman ” of the old school. Mose Evans must have been vastly more difficult to manage, because he is an individual and not a type. But he is well managed, and is presented in a simple strength that is very striking. Like the rest of Mr. Baker’s people he is seen as well as felt, and he stands in the story, a stately presence of manhood, naturally good and wise and noble. It is fine how his love for Agnes Throop became part, not of his religious emotion—that is always nauseating—but of his religious conviction: if Christ died for him she can love him, and he goes about to make himself worthy. We would willingly have seen less of him in his intellectually regenerate state. He does not lose grandeur, but it is not good art in Mr. Baker to task his reader so heavily as he does with the realization of Mose Evans in his new estate. A glimpse of him, some characteristic hint of what he became, we think would have been better than the elaborate picture that is given, though this, too, is interesting. So, also, we think the effect of the story would have gained if those long letters of Agnes Throop’s at the end could have been condensed and presented in some brief, strong, direct expression of the author’s. In fact, it appears to us that the conception of the, narration is always a burden to the story. Mr. Baker sacrifices his reader’s comfort altogether too much to the verisimilitude of the land agent’s style. If that character must tell the story, his style could have been indicated and then quietly dropped after a chapter or two ; it is very tiresome to have him backing and filling, and coming in and going out, and weaving a sometimes impenetrable mesh of parentheses throughout the whole book. The worst of it is that all the people of the story catch the trick of his style—even Miss Throop writes like him.

The women are less surprisingly good than the men in Mose Evans. Mrs. Throop and Mrs. Evans are the best of them; but the others, though not so tangible, are thoroughly imaginable. Agues Throop is at least a new and high type of heroine ; and the story is an entirely new love-story. In being a love-story it differs from Mr. Baker’s former books, and it greatly advances his place amongst American authors.

— Mrs. Moulton’s stories;, though brief tales for the most part, are united in a common purpose of exemplifying the vicissitudes of women left, by accident of one kind or another, to shift for themselves. The heroines represent various classes, and various temperaments; and there is a good deal of suggestiveness in the different problems with which they find themselves obliged to deal ; in none more so than in that of the tale called Twelve Years of My Life. A young woman, compelled to earn her living as a shop-girl (the daughter of a literary man who had died very poor), makes acquaintance with a man of high character, who has separated from a capricious wife, and who comes to love our heroine, to whom he confesses both his passion and his antecedents, with the prayer that at least she will let him aid her in her poverty, out of the abundance of his own means. Having already become attached to him, before this announcement, she now hastens away, to avoid a proximity which has thus become intolerable to her; falls in with his wife, who, she finds, has recognized and repented her past follies; becomes her friend, and instructress to her children ; and eventually reunites husband and wife, consigning herself to the life-long drudgery of a teacher, remote from Loth, notwithstanding their entreaties for her to remain with them. Little Gibraltar, too, portrays the pathos of a young girl’s situation, who finds a widower — the father of a school-mate in love with her, herself returning the sentiment ; yet feels the barrier of the former wife’s invisible presence between them, and will not break through it, though the refusal results in the widower’s speedy decline and death. There is a fantastic and supernatural strain in this, distinct from anything else in the book. We place it above the other tales, for artistic handling. The longest of the set, Fleeing from Fate, has the disadvantage of being too short for a novel and a little too long for its present purpose, but is concisely treated. Household Gods we like for its greater brightness and cheeriness, and because it contains less of painfulness than some of the others. The book is not wanting in pretty and ingenious incident, although sometimes death, sickness, financial disaster, and meetings of particular persons at the right times and places, run rather in the track of conventional expedient. Mrs. Moulton’s style is clear, careful, quiet, and her method of story-telling is wholesome in its simplicity and reserve. The book is distinguished by superior fibre ; all the stories are earnest; and there is a fine confidence shown in the interest and satisfactoriness of love-episodes as subjects for artistic treatment. Everything is told with a straightforwardness often imparting a singular sense of verisimilitude ; and this quality of her art, with her underlying moral clearness and love of principle, makes Mrs. Moulton a welcome addition to the list of our story-tellers.

— Although Spring Floods has been mentioned in our notices of French and German literature, we must recur to it, apropos of the English version now published, and express again our feeling of its great power. Nowhere else do we believe the terribleness of a guilty passion has been so nakedly and unsparingly portrayed, and rarely can the beauty of the lawful love it ruins have been so sweetly touched. It is an awful tragedy, far beyond the power of any comment to impart; the reader must go to the book itself for a full sense of the fatal spell that binds the weak-willed but well-purposed hero, and the intolerable shame and despair to which it leaves his wasted life. Maria Nikolaevna is a creation before which such capricious wantons as Irene and Varvara Pavlovna seem pale and thin : she has no caprices, she is the incarnation of wicked force, of infernal freedom, of unpitying lust of power; she does not for an instant falter, or repent, or regret ; yet monstrous as she is, you do not feel that she is a monstrosity, but something quite within the range of human nature. She is so great and impressive a figure, that one almost forgets that there is any one else in the book : the pure and true Gemma whom Sanin abandons for her, the operatically heroic, true-hearted Pantaleone, the simple, adoring boy Emilio, who pins his faith to Sanin, and who is perhaps the most pathetic victim of Sanin’s helpless treachery. It seems to us the greatest hook yet written by Turgénieff, whose name the literary history of our century must inscribe, with that of Hawthorne, high above all others who have dealt with the problem of evil.

— Mr. Cooke’s Pretty Mrs. Gaston is an innocent little story of about the consistency of what, not altogether in compliment, is called a magazine-story. The scene is laid in Virginia, and although the fox in that region is hunted in a formal fashion and not shot at from behind a stone wall, as in less favored climes, the familiar passions of love and jealousy, and their accompaniments, pique and bantering, have as much to do with the story as with others of the same calibre. The simpleness of the tale will not allow the slight plot to be told ; we can only darkly say that villainy is baffled, and that there are three happy marriages at the end of the book. To reach this conclusion we have thirty-nine chapters, and but two hundred and twenty-three by no means closely printed pages, so that the reader is tolerably sure of having his first impression of the child-like innocence of the novel confirmed by its outward appearance. The little tales at the end are very slight matters.

— It is right to say to such readers of ours as formed hopes of all Mr. Hardy’s work from A Pair of Blue Eyes, that Desperate Remedies is hardly worth their reading. The heroine has the Charm of girlish naturalness that he contrives to impart to all his women, and there are strong expressions of character in other persons of the story. But they are not mastered by his imagination ; they feebly change into something else, at times; and the plot is a wearisome confusion of motives and purposes, in which there is little color or definiteness or probability.

— Under the somewhat general title of Philosophers and Fools, Miss Duliring has collected nine essays on various subjects, such us Who are Wicked'? Antagonistic People, Finding our Level, Romance versus Criticism, Man and Woman, etc., which, it will be observed, cover quite as much ground as is implied in the name of the book. With so wide a field one cannot expect to find a groat deal of novelty that shall be interesting:. There is a not unfamiliar ring about the following apostrophe: “ Inexplicable art thou, 0 Amor! We cannot trust thee wholly, and yet are forced to acknowledge thee all-potent in moving hearts hither and thither at thy lawless will and roving fancy ! So arbitrarily are thy delights and torments dispensed, that those who at one period most eagerly seek thy grace, at another strive most earnestly to elude thy presence. How utterly incapacitated for the ordinary work of life are thy votaries! . . . Mischievous god! Well symbolized by an innocent little child whose blindness makes him the more harmless, he first attracts and then tyrannizes, so deftly, that even the proudest is finally compelled to submit to his yoke.”

There are numerous quotations from various authors; Goethe, Schiller, Ruskin, Shelley, De Quincey, Dr. Furness, Victor Hugo, Emerson, Héloïse and Abelard, Rousseau, Carlyle, Bulwer, Sainte-Beuve, G. H. Lewes, Hawthorne, Voltaire, Sir James Mackintosh, Locke, Lamlor, Mirabeau, Lord Jeffrey, Spielhagen, Dr. Johnson, De Tocqueville, Michelet, Dryden, Horace Walpole, Alfieri, Leigh Hunt, Madame de Stael, Thoreau, Balzac, Fichte, Helps, Pope, Charles Lamb, Grote, Montaigne, Herbert Spencer, and Burns, a list which serves to corroborate the opinion, formed from the general tone of the book, that the author was a wide reader. The art of writing about so vague a subject as human nature consists, in a great measure, in putting well-worn thoughts in a new setting ; this approach to merit is hardly to he found in this book, and there is not enough newly-discovered truth to lighten up the somewhat verbose statement of what has been thought out and uttered already time out of mind. It is hardly more than a dilution of not very startling remarks: that genius has its duties ; that love is powerful; that fiction, if not taken to excess, is Salutary; that wisdom is better than folly, etc., etc. Three hundred and fifty pages are devoted to the expression of these truths, but the quotations are often pat and readable.

— Since we announced in The Atlantic the appearance of Mrs. Ellis’s Life and Works of Mrs, Barbauld, another Life and Works of the authoress has appeared in England. It is written by Mrs. LeBreton, a niece of Mrs. Barbauld, and if we may judge by the notices of it in the English newspapers, it is not a performance which will make Mrs. Ellis regret the time so diligently employed on her own book. The Athenamm, in an article supplementing a review of Mrs. LoBreton’s biography, speaks of Mrs. Ellis’s book, which had not reached England when that review was written, as a careful and conscientious study, and declares that no allusion to Mrs. Barbauld in the literature of her time seems to hare escaped the industrious research of her American biographer, adding that it is to be regretted Mrs. LeBreton could not have made as good use of her more abundant material as Mrs. Ellis has made of what she has been able to collect. Certainly it seems a thing to be regretted that the two ladies could not have joined forces, and, instead of two books, given us one complete biography. In its review of Mrs. LeBreton’s book the writer in The Athenæum charged that lady with concealing certain facts relative to Mr. Barbauld — his insanity, the misery it brought to his wife, and his melancholy end by suicide. The writer spoke with such assurance as to these facts that it was difficult not to believe he had some private means of information; later, in noticing Mrs. Ellis’s book, he blamed her for a similar reticence, and it certainly seemed on his showing as if biographical truth had been sacrificed by both writers to an unwillingness to make public what might hurt some private feelings. But we think it may he shown that whatever explanation Mrs. LeBreton may have to offer for her sins of omission, Mrs. Ellis had a better reason than a merely sentimental one for not dwelling upon the mental peculiarities of Mr. Barbauld. She no doubt felt that in her distinct mentions of his insanity (see pp240,249,261, and 264) all had been said that was necessary, and though she could have told perhaps as many disagreeable and even painful anecdotes to prove the peculiarities of his disposition as would have fully satisfied her critic, yet we must conclude it was after due consideration that she came to the decision it could add nothing to the real value of her book as a sketch of Mrs. Barbauld, to relate minutely all the phases of her husband’s insanity.

The Athenæum speaks with great contempt of Mr. Barbauld, and among other charges calls him a Frenchman. This would, of course, be damaging if it were true, but the fact is that he was born in England, of a family settled many years in England, his grandfather having been brought to that country when a boy. (See Mrs. Ellis’s Life, p. 54.) His insanity did not develop until late in life, and even then took the harmless enough turn of a passion for scrubbing his body, in which purification he would spend entire days. It can never be known whether his death by drowning in the New River — a brickwalled canal made out of the little river of that name by Sir Hugh Middleton to supply water to London — was accidental or suicidal. And there being no proof of suicide, Mrs. Ellis, who, when in England, took great pains to investigate every part of her subject, wisely, as we think, abstained from expressing a decided opinion.

When she was in England, Mrs. Ellis had much conversation with Mr. James Martineau, the Carpenters, Mr. Crabb Robinson, and Mrs. LeBreton on the subject of Mr. Barbauld, and the result of her inquiries left her in no doubt as to the greater wisdom of what we may call a conservative treatment of the subject. Mr. Barbauld was an eccentric man all his life, but when we consider his great success as a teacher, his pleasant relationship with the Aikens, — who gave up to Mrs. Barbauld and him one of their children for absolute adoption, — and his long and blameless ministry in the Christian church, we cannot think of him as a man properly to be called insane, and if he did finally become so it was not worth while Saying more about it than Mrs. Ellis has said. Perhaps it is not being uncharitable to trace the animus of the writer in The Athenæum to that old jealousy of Mrs. Barbauld, or rather of her success and influence, which, according to the testimony of more than one of the distinguished people who know her well, and were till lately living to tell us about her, was excited in the Aikens, and which is believed to have colored Miss Lucy Aiken’s Life of her aunt. There seems little reason to doubt that she could have written a better Life if she had wished. Unfortunately, Miss Lucy Aiken bears a not very pleasant character; she seems to have had an uncomfortable temper, she was jealous of her aunt, and she did not like Mr. Barbauld. It would seem, then, as if the spurt of angry flame in The Athenæum might be nothing more than the result of a breath blown upon forgotten embers, that would have died a natural death if they could have been left to themselves.

— Beaten Paths run through such welltraveled lands as England, France, and Switzerland, and it is much to the author’s credit that she has written so entertaining a book about them. As we make out, she is one of seven unprotected American females who spend their summer vacation in Europe together, and have what they would call, out of print, — and on small provocation, in it, — a real good time. Their experiences are as courageously recorded as they were encountered, and part of the amusingness of the book is the innocent wit with which the fair travelers confront the social prejudices of continental Europe. It is indeed very brightly written, and if brightness is not wisdom always, why neither is dullness, of which we never have to complain in our author. Still, if a friendly pen could have been drawn through some of the wittiest passages of the book, it would have been better for her : things in the cold black and white of literature are different from the same things airily laughed at in company that one knows familiarly. By and by the ladies will learn this,— or their critics will learn to judge them more generously. We believe that Americans in Europe are generally more than ready to sympathize with “ the fair, the old,” in that venerable museum, and Mrs. Thompson does so very brightly and intelligently, and always originally.

— Many of our readers will recall the interesting article of Mr. Sumner’s in an early number of this magazine, which forms the groundwork of his monograph, Prophetic Voices concerning America. In this later form it contains many additional extracts, and, as it stands, it was intended by the late senator to be his contribution to the rapidly approaching celebration of the hundredth birthday of our nation. Many of the quotations to be found in the book are of undeniable interest, but many too, it is to be said, share the obscurity which for a long time has belonged to more formal prophetic utterances, and require to be read with the eye of faithAs a whole, however, they form an interesting collection of detached sentences, showing sometimes actual political acuteness, as was the case with Turgot, John Adams, and others. On the other hand, when in Sir William Jones’s Ode on the Nuptials of Lord Viscount Althorp and Miss Lavinia Brigham, eldest daughter of Charles Lord Lucon, March 6, 1781, we read, —

one is less struck by the political foresight of the writer, than by the somewhat singular mention of our own country. There is the same vagueness to he noticed in some other of the prophetic voices ; a few, too, yet require time for their fulfillment, as well as that about the youth of Delaware kneeling to the throne of Virtue. It is an interesting volume because it contains so many different verdicts from different points of view', and not one is dull, although they are of varying importance.

— The Board of Health continues its exemplary literary activity, and gives us this year a volume of 550 pages full of useful matter. There is not much original scientific work represented, Professor Nichols’s thorough and admirable paper on the condition of some Massachusetts rivers being the only one of this kind, unless we include the report by Dr. Upham on cerbro-spinal meningitis, in which a very painstaking and full collection of facts has been made, without, however, any important conclusions flowing from them. In the other papers knowledge already in existence is Collected and put into a diffusible form, for the enlightenment of the public mind — surely one of the most important duties of a Board of Health. The articles on the health of our farmers, and on school hygiene, with those on the hygienic prevention of consumption, and the “ political economy of health,” will be most widely read. The first one is full of information and sound suggestion. It would appear that the farmers are unusually healthy and long-lived as a class, but that their wives and children are less so — and that to a great extent, as regards the wives, the causes of this are preventible by intelligence. The most important suggestion, it seems to us, in the paper on school hygiene by Dr. Winsor, is that relative to “ halftime,” the name given in England “ to a system of schooling provided by law for children employed in factories and workshops. By means of it the children have secured to them for daily instruction one half the number of hours spent in the government schools by children not at manual work. It has been in operation about thirty years, and full reports of its working, made by competent and faithful official inspectors, are to be found in parliamentary documents.

. . . A most unexpected result of it has been to prove that these half-time scholars learn quite as much as the children who are in the same schools twice as many hours a day.” An English correspondent says: “ The study is a pleasing diversion from the workshop. The teacher, instead of losing a large part of his time in more or less unsatisfactory attempts to get his class into working order, finds boys already brought to order by the discipline of the shop. Each department helps the other and yet is a relaxation to the other. Probably a halftimer will learn as much in a fifteen minutes’ lesson as a common scholar would in thirty minutes.” This from the greater vivacity of attention, of course. The paradox tends to vanish if we reflect that all new learning, if it is to remain in the mind, must have a chance to settle there and be digested. Every man knows that if he is reduced from any cause, say, bad eyesight, to one hour of daily study instead of six, he nevertheless learns much more than one sixth of his former allowance. Six months with one hour are far more than an equivalent of one month with six hours daily, from the fact that what is taken in during the one hour settles distinctly and thoroughly into the mind during the following twenty-three hours ; whereas if five other hours of study succeeded it, it would be jostled and shaken in confusion and dimness. What is true of men is almost as true of the minds of children. Too much in a day breeds confusion and is worse than too little. It is true that but little new matter might be given daily, and the extra hours devoted to iteration — and between this and “half-time” a theoretical comparison is rather difficult to make. Half-time, to be successful, no doubt calls for higher qualities in the teacher. It should be tried by parents and teachers in this country on a larger scale than heretofore. Any reader who desires more information on the subject will find it in Dr. Winsor’s paper, beginning with page 419.

Dr. Jarvis’s paper on the political economy of health is full of interesting statistical and other information, chopped up after the execrable newspaper fashion into little paragraphs with semi-exclamatory headings, as if the reader needed an artificial spur every few lines to make him go on. He gives a table of the proportions of the sustaining to the dependent classes in different countries. The sustainers are those between the ages of twenty and seventy ; all others are classed as dependents. We learn from this table what, in view of a rather wide-spread doubt as to the physical future of the homo americanus, is cheerful news to us, that of all the countries given, Vermont has the largest percentage (4.50) of inhabitants over seventy years old, Norway and France coming next. Massachusetts, with 2.80, stands above England, but below Scotland. Prussia has 2.03. The whole United States but 1.80, below which however are still Ireland and Spain. Dr. Jarvis goes through the usual exhibit of the waste involved in all sickness and in premature death, and accounts a dead child as having been a consumer pure and simple — who has never paid his debt. Abstraction made of the moral side, the child is of course nothing but a consumer. But there are forces that no political economist can measure; and while the child lived, were it but three years, he was a producer of prudence, industry, and energy in his father. The hours his mother spent in caring for him when ill and dying are certainly a pure loss economically, but, as Professor Lazarus of Berne says, what statistician can count the mother’s gain of moral depth and force during those very hours, as they raised her from the cheating play of life up to the gates of eternity ? And so of invalidism and old age : they do not only consume, but call forth what but for them would hardly exist, unenvylng devotion, grateful piety. And, as the same author says : “The sentiment of filial piety, kept alive in a nation, is a moral power worth many economic values.”

— Amid the long intellectual silence induced at the South by the exhaustion of the war, it is with pleasure that we welcome the publication of the lectures on religion and science recently delivered at Oakland, California, by Prof. Joseph Le Conte, formerly of the University of South Carolina, and one of the most accomplished of American naturalists. These lectures were not written fur publication, but were delivered extemporaneously and taken down verbatim, by a reporter provided for the purpose by some gentlemen who had first heard them in a small Bible-class, and who wished to have them repeated to a larger audience and afterward published.

In the preface to the work, the author says: “ I fear I may not entirely please either the mere scientist on the one hand, or the mere theologian on the other; ” and as regards the former, his fear is not without foundation, for the term scientist or savant does and can mean nothing else, per se, than skeptic — he, that is, who approaches all subjects with doubt, and with the disposition to accept nothing that cannot be indisputably proved. Professor Le Conte, on the contrary, assumes his premises to begin with, and addresses his hearers always as his “ Christian friends.”He says, “ Theism, or a belief in God, or in gods, or in a supernatural agency of some kind controlling the phenomena around us, is the fundamental base and condition of all religion, and is therefore universal, necessary, and intuitive. I will not, then, attempt to bring forward any proof of that which lies back of all proof, and is already more certain than anything can be made by any process of reasoning.

. . . The region of second causes, and this only, is the domain of science. . . . But the recognition of second causes cannot preclude the idea of the existence of God. If in tracing the chain of causes upward, we stop at any cause, or force, or principle, that force or principle becomes for us God, since it is an efficient agent controlling the universe. Thus we cannot get rid of Theism if we would. Turn it out, as we may do, in its nobler forms as revealed in Scripture, and it comes in again upon us from another quarter in its ignoble forms, it may he magnetism, electricity, or gravity, or some other supposed efficient agent controlling nature. In some form, noble or ignoble, it will become a guest in the human heart. I therefore repent, Theism neither requires nor admits of proof.”The modern scientific man, however, keeps his mind suspended, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth, neither believing nor disbelieving, but simply looking upon religion as a problem without sufficient data to invite scientific investigation. Professor Le Conte lays it down as a “ law of our nature to pass from effects and secondary causes up to the first cause,” or “ from the objects of sense to the object of faith ; ” but many scientific men ask calmly, “Why must there be & first?” But the burden of disproof rests with the skeptics, not the harden of proof with the believers..

As one of the latter, Professor Le Conte does not hesitate to avow himself. Indeed, he says on p. 233, “ I believe it is the duty of every scientific man who is also a lover of his fellow-men, to attempt to restore again the faith which he himself, perhaps, has helped to destroy, and to build again its foundations upon a more solid, enduring, and rational basis ;” and the object of his lectures was to show that there is “ a general accordance between the teachings of Scripture and the teachings of nature,” that “ the truths revealed in the one are also revealed in the other,” and therefore, that both revelations come to us from the same divine source. A profound spirit of reverence, joined with intellectual breadth and a manly courage, pervades the entire work, and it is not often that so many beautiful and illuminating thoughts on the common subjects of religious contemplation are presented by a layman to lay readers. A less dogmatic tone, however, in some instances, would have been more effective, and the many italicized sentences weaken the style, and show how much later the Southerners are in changing the old fashions of diction than any other part of the English-speaking world. The chapter on Holiness we found to be the most original in the book, and to strike a deeper chord than any exposition we remember on the subject.

— Signal services have been in operation to a greater or less extent for the past fifteen years in the principal European countries. The Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade was early organized in London and placed under the supervision of Admiral Filzroy. The government of Great Britain has since aided this private enterprise by the establishment of a number of signal-stations similar to those now in operation in our own country. Russia was the first to follow the example of England, and adopted an admirable system of observations by stations directed and controlled by a central physical observatory. In addition to these branches of the public service in England and Russia, observations have been taken by eighty-six meteorological stations under the control of Helvetic societies, and the principal observatories of France have extended their meteorological work and have spread widely their results for the benefit of commerce. We learn from the. report of General Myers, embodied in this volume, that much has been done in putting this comparatively new department of the war office on an efficient scientific footing. There are now seventy-eight signal stations in the United States, an increase of thirteen during the last year. The department, recognizing the value of systematic instruction for its assistants, has established a school of instruction and practice at Fort Whipple, Virginia. We are glad to see that General Myers perceives the need of preliminary training in this branch of the public service, and accepts the maxims of the civil service reform. The permanent employment of skilled men is also insisted upon. There are thirty cautionary signal stations in the United States, at which the display of signals is ordered for the benefit of commerce. During the year orders have been issued for the display of the cautionary signals, in anticipation of eighty-eight probable storms. In seventy cases the storms anticipated manifested their effects at one or more of the stations at which the signals were ordered. We do not learn, however, whether the force and direction of the gales so announced answered to the forecasts. It was found that the forecasts of the signal service in Great Britain were true in the case of storms, but failed in foretelling the force and direction of the winds.

For the exact study of the phenomena of the upper regions of the atmosphere, temporary stations have been established at elevated points: one on the summit of Mount Washington, one on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, and one on Pike’s Peak, Colorado. The report contains the monthly records of the stations, specimens of the weather charts, diagrams of the fluctuations of the flow of the Mississippi River, of the Red, of the Ohio, and of the Cumberland, and descriptions of the methods of taking observations, with diagrams of the instruments used, which consist of barometers, anemometers, thermometers, anemoscopes, hygrometers, and rain-gauges. It is to be hoped that simultaneous observations will he taken in future on the electrical condition of the air. The quadrant electrometers of Sir William Thomson could be readily employed for this purpose. We learn that the condition of the instruments at each station is inspected regularly by competent officers detailed for the purpose. The signal service is in communication with the meteorological office at St. Petersburg, London, and Constantinople ; and propose to exchange by mail one daily simultaneous report taken over the entire extent of the Russian and Turkish empires, the British kingdom, and the United States. The action of the government in founding this branch of the public service is gratifying. Although influenced largely by practical considerations for the good of commerce and agriculture, it is to be hoped that it had a desire to advance the subject of meteorology, which has been sadly in want of systematic observations.

— The Annual Record of Science and Industry contains the monthly record of science published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Mr. Baird succeeds in making a readable book. The editor’s notes are full, and draw attention in an agreeable manner to the new discoveries of the year. The importance of certain investigations is perhaps dwelt upon too much. We do not see the touch of eminent men of science in this volume ; can the accusation of the free use of scissors lie at their door ? lor the library of a scientific man the book is not an acquisition ; and it would have been amply sufficient for the non-scientific reader to have published the editor’s notes alone in a thin volume, instead of in the duodecimo before us. The eyes and time and pocket of the purchaser would thus have been economized, — not a mean consideration in this age of many books. It is a pity that the many excellent Handbuchs and Jahrbuchs of Germany have not been taken as a type for the eye of the specialist. With the exception of the editor’s notes, the volume has too much the appearance of bookmaking.

— Too much history is dead to the imagination, by reason of the chronicler having abstracted it from its local and homely garb, in order to dress it up in classic drapery. Even the familiar facts of Concord fight and the battle of Bunker Hill have come to be unreal and mythical to many of us, for want of some graphic recital which should have fixed the deeds of those days in their places, giving us a panoramic picture that Time’s changes could not easily efface. And it is with a view to meet this want, that Mr. Drake has compiled his volume of rambles among the Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex. It must be confessed that he has not succeeded in giving a lively presentment of any one of the historical phases which he takes up; but he has made a patient and detailed endeavor to collect what visible fragments remain of the past of Middlesex, in the way of old houses and other landmarks ; and in this he has rendered a very valuable service. Unfortunately, he is prolix : the volume should have been reduced by one third. A habit of association in heterogeneous groups leads the writer to tack on to one statement an indefinite number of others, often irrelevant enough; as when, in the chapter called An Hour in the Government Dockyard, he launches into a digression on the Woolwich Arsenal.

Mr. Drake does not claim to do more than “ rearrange the scenes ” of historic action. These scenes are elusive enough, for not only are almost all the old houses of Revolutionary times lacking, but the very face of the country adjoining Boston is undergoing a change, and hills which gave the American artillery its position are being bodily carried away. It is excusable, therefore, that Mr. Drake should seek to attach to the somewhat scanty material that presents itself every item that can be in any way connected with it, even by the slenderest threads. He is, however, less fortunate in these side-disquisitions than in the simple enumeration of historical or genealogical facts, as when, for example, he attempts a comparison between Hawthorne and Burns, on the ground that “ both were given to convivial indulgence”! To the traveler and the antiquarian beginner the book cannot fail to be of use, and its value is not a little enhanced by the heliotype illustrations of old mansions, and a reproduction in the same kind of a map of Boston and vicinity at the time of the siege.

— In his little volume Dr. Winchell has goue briefly but carefully over the ground which many of the adherents of Darwinism take with one leap, making up their minds very much as we may imagine docile youth in Pennsylvania deciding on the relative merits of free trade and protection. His aim was a most useful one, namely, to represent the arguments in favor of the doctrine of evolution, and along with them the objections made to it; to these are added a few pages on the theistic hearings of the hypothesis. This includes a short history of the growth of the doctrine, and of the different forms it has taken in the minds of different adherents. Such a book has, of course, its main value from the statistics it contains ; its space forbids such discussion of the mooted points as shall carry definite information or satisfactory conviction to the reader, anxious to make up his own mind on the matter ; for these he must go to the fountain-head, the copious literature of the subject. Dr. Winchell has done his work with fair-mindedness, and many of the objections he adduces seem unanswerable; those, however, to whom they are presented refuse to he crushed by them, find await the possibility of explanation, if none can be found now. His own point of view is by no means that of an ardent defender of the cause he discusses. Some of his arguments hardly carry conviction; as, for instance, that in which it is stated that different vehicles, landaus, rockawaya, farmwagons, ox-carts, drays, and wheelbarrows “ represent one archetypal idea in the various stages of its development; they sustain homological relations to each other, co-existent with obvious special ‘design’ in the adaptations of each product. But who would think it necessary to regard the wheelbarrow the progenitor of the ox-cart and the landau ! ” No one, we are quite sure, not even the most fervent disciple of Darwin, nor probably Mr. Darwin himself'. But the argument is extended to the point of throwing the same doubt on variations of the equidæ. It is as if Paley’s lost watch had been found once more. It is putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.

— It cannot be truly said that Professor Sumner has written a History of American Currency. Rather, he has prepared a book of illustrations drawn from American experience showing the evil effects of trying to establish a paper currency. Judged as a history, it is a mass of fragments having no unity or coherence ; considered as illustrations of certain principles, the work is a most valuable collection of facts, thoroughly digested and properly arranged. Regarded in the latter point of view, the work is of great merit; and its immediate and practical use is proved by its rapid sale. Whoever turns to it with the expectation of finding a complete history of American currency will surely he disappointed ; but whoever looks within to find new arguments against the expediency of inflating the present currency will not scan its pages in vain. It is preëminently a book for the times; a light set up to warn inflationists of the inevitable perils that will follow the adoption of their financial creed.

Professor Sumner’s task was not an easy one. The financial experience of our country is short, but prolific with experiments in almost every department of economic science. During the two hundred and fifty years of our colonial and national existence we have tried almost every conceivable currency scheme. Nevertheless, the facts relating to many of these schemes are not easily accessible, they are overlaid with rubbish, and it requires an infinite amount of patience and toil to gather all the facts necessary to weave a history of American currency. No complete collection of materials exists for such an undertaking. Fragmentary as the work of Professor Sumner’s is, he evinces a rare knowledge of his subject; and in the preface, he inspires the reader with the hope that a more complete history of American finance is to issue from his pen.

One of the most interesting passages in the book relates to the history of the numerous experiments tried by the original States, while they were yet colonies, to provide themselves with a paper currency. Those who think that such a currency is an improvement upon gold and silver, the outcome of a more recent and higher civilization, will find in this volume ample evidence that paper currency is an old invention, and that in the colonial days, when a higher degree of honesty pervaded the land than pervades it now, and when, therefore, it was more favorably situated for trying paper money experiments, all sorts of money schemes were faithfully tried. For one hundred and fifty years, such experiments were continued with but little cessation.

In 1720, when trade was stagnant in Massachusetts, “there was a great cry for more bills. Let it be observed how this complaint is heard again every four or five years, although the amount of paper was continually increasing. It is the best instance in history of the way in which a country ‘grows up' to any amount of currency. Here was a sparse population, in a new country with untouched resources, and it seemed to them necessary to have recourse to artificial issues of currency to make business brisk ; to get up enterprises for the sake of ‘ making work ; ’ and to lay bounties on products in order to enable the people to carry on production. The distress was real, but it came from turning their backs on what nature offered them gratuitously, and violating the laws by which they might have profited by these gifts.” In order to increase the paper issues, “ expeditions were favored for the purpose of bringing about issues of paper, and public works were advocated for the same reason.” Previously to this, a large amount of bills had been issued to carry on the expeditions of 1690 and 1709 against Canada; £100,000 more bills were issued in 1715, “because bills were scarce.” How often have the following declarations of a writer iu 1719 been substantially repeated during the last six months: “£50,000 ought to be laid out for building a bridge over Charles River, so that workmen might be employed and currency enlarged, as well as the public accommodated, and ruin will come unless more bills of credit are emitted.” Two years later, the governor was forbidden by royal instructions from signing bills authorizing the issue of more paper currency. The craving for it had got last hold of the people. For the next twenty years, the question of inflating the currency gave rise to frequent conflicts between successive governors and the lower house of the legislature, as that body was perpetually bent toward inflation. Its persistency was so great that it partially succeeded in its aims, notwithstanding the, opposition of governors, and when at last it succumbed, it chartered a land bank to do what the lower house was powerless of accomplishing. This was in 1739. “Trade was stagnant and ‘ money scarce.’ ” The bank consisted of a number of land owners, who formed a company and mortgaged their estates to it for its notes, giving three per cent, per annum interest in merchandise, and live per cent, per annum on the principal in the same currency. A mechanic, with two sureties, might have .£100 stock. The notes were payable after twenty years “ in manufactures of the province.” “ For a thorough-going application of the paper theory, nothing has ever been proposed anywhere, much less put in operation, which could equal this. A note for $1 payable twenty years hence in gold without interest, when interest is three per cent., is worth fifty-five cents, or, if interest is six per cent., thirty-one cents. If payable in any one of a dozen commodities, it is payable in that one which twenty years hence may be the cheapest. At what rate, then, ought a man who to-day gives wheat for the note, to make the exchange ? These notes were based on nothing, floated on nothing, and represented nothing definable. The system of money which consists in ‘ basing,’ ' floating,’ and ' representing ’ was, therefore, here in perfection.” By 1743, Massachusetts had grown sick of her paper currency. The “ paper money disease,” as Gouge forcibly calls it, was killing her. She proposed to the other New England colonies to appoint commissioners who should conspire for doing away with the bills. This attempt failed. The next year the governor resolved to capture Louisburg from the French. The friends of paper currency fell into the scheme, and all thirsting for adventure. The colonists having taken the place, England in 1749 voted to ransom it from them. The sum coming to Massachusetts was £138,649 sterling, which at eleven for one, the ruling exchange, would nearly cancel the paper. It was proposed to ask Parliament to ship this sum in silver dollars and copper coins, and that these should be used as far as they would go, the rest to be called in by a tax. “After considerable opposition this course was adopted. The silver was sent over and exchanged. Prices were adjusted to this new measure, and the silver remained in circulation when it no longer had a meaner rival. The ‘shock’ which was. apprehended did not occur. The only shock was to Rhode Island and New Hampshire, who found their trade transferred to the ‘ silver colony,’ and their paper suddenly and heavily depreciated. . . . Trade now revived steadily and rapidly, and we hear no more of ‘scarcity of money ’ until the next violation of the laws of circulation.” Thus is history ever repeating herself.

Such is a fair specimen of Professor Sumner’s style and mode of treating his subject. Terse, and epigrammatic at times, his book has a freshness and vivacity rarely found in works of this kind.

There are two valuable additional chapters : one chapter upon the English Bank Restriction Act, accompanied with the Bullion Report; the other upon Austrian Paper Money. Professor Sumner’s exposition of the celebrated Bullion Report brings out the important features of that valuable document, which has worthily engaged the study and excited the admiration of every well-read student of economic science.

— Dr. Hovey discusses various timely subjects in his book, Religion and the State ; and although we are unable to assent to all his views, we are ready to acknowledge the merits of his style, precision and moderation, and the fair-mindedness he generally shows in his arguments. The aim of his book is to define the duties of the state to the individual in general, and more particularly the ground which it should take in the matter of exemption from taxation of the property of religious and charitable associations. This last matter is one which agitation is bringing forward for settlement with a certain amount of prominence. For the most part it has not found much support from the presidents and professors of theological institutions, and the reasons which influence Dr. Hovey to argue in support of taxing churches and church property are not the same as those which have suddenly been revealed to the enemies who are attacking the weakest outposts of Christianity. “The revenues of the state,”he says, “should he drawn as equitably as possible from all the persons and property under its protection. ... It is important for those who justify the exemption of certain kinds of property to bear in mind several facts; namely: —

“ 1. The property in question, whatever it be, has been put to the use which it now serves by the free act of its owners. . . . In a majority of cases, though not in all, it would have been put in the same form, to do the same work, had it been Subject to taxation from the first.

“2. The protection of this property by the state gives it a considerable part of its value for the use to which it is applied. Thus the state is actually doing something every year to preserve or increase its value. It watches over it by day and by night. It defends it from the thief, the robber, and the mob. . . .

“3. The state is supported in part, at least, by taxes levied upon the property of the people; and therefore, if a part of that property is devoted to uses which exempt it from taxation, a heavier burden must be laid upon the rest. Is not this the same in effect as a gift from the state of the amount saved to the church by exemption ? It must be, if we look at the matter from a simply fiscal point of view. But would Christians of any name in this land he willing to commit themselves for the future to the policy of receiving from the state a yearly stipend for the prosecution of their work, that stipend being exacted from the people without regard to their religious belief? If not, then it is clear that they should not wish their church property to he relieved permanently from taxation.”

This, he acknowledges, will lead to withdrawing the exemption from educational and charitable institutions. And however unpleasant may he to us the right of a religious body speculating in real estate, we should likewise try to picture to ourselves our probable enjoyment of the closing of our already struggling hospitals. Fortunately man is an illogical creature, and some compromise may be hit upon by our law-makers; otherwise we should for ourselves rather see a religious corporation growing rich, than the doors of our noblest public charities closed against the sufferers who, theoretically, are those who would most profit by the change. It is well, when beginning an outcry on such general principles, to look at all the possible consequences ; and a syllogism may be neat without the conclusion being advisable as a course of action. This part of his subject Dr. Hovey does not discuss; there is a great deal of truth in what he says about the exemption of church property, but the question demands a broader examination before it is completely settled. The church of Rome is rather a bugaboo to our author’s mind.

— Dr. Tyng’s The Christian Pastor is a reprint of the lectures delivered by him before the Theological School of the Boston University in the autumn of last year. They seem to have given great pleasure to his hearers, and it is at the separate request of both the students and the faculty of the school that they are now published. Some objection might he raised by cavilers to the literary criticism made by the faculty in their resolutions calling for the printing of the lectures, where attention is called to “ the pureness and chasteness of his language and the simplicity of his style, throwing a rich charm over every sentence used,” or to “the sharp discrimination of a professed dialectician,” and to “the rhetorical excellence of one who is a master of his mother-tongue,”for to those accustomed to profane literature his writing resembles much more the mellifluous conventionality too often heard in the pulpit, than it does an intelligible exposition to young men. Still, it has been passed upon and approved by high authority, which knows what it wants. Without wishing to pick flaws, and certainly this book cannot claim to be exempt from such criticism, especially when so much is claimed for its style, it may be said that there are many sentences like the following : “ Keep the edge of prayer bright and sharp, appropriate, intelligent, instructive, scriptural, and spiritual.” Is there a definite meaning attaching to every one of these words ? Is it the Deity the prayer is to instruct ? Is there not some vagueness about this? Again: “Never be impatient. You will have narrow necks to fill. And the gentle dropping of the teakettle will be far better and more successful than the swashing of the pump.”

Without disrespect, may -we not ask if it would not he better for young men preparing to leave their studies, and with all their inexperience to go forth into the world, to have part of their preparation consist of practice in hearing and using the ordinary lauguage of the citizens of the world, with whom the greater part of their work lies ? In our opinion that might lead to some better result than the vagueness of thought and phrase which so often characterizes hooks about religion.

— In his Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming, Mr. Beecher throws off his clerical coat, and instructs and entertains us very charmingly.

Perhaps the best thing in the book is his discourse about Apples, which is almost as good in its way as Charles Lamb. The life and movement in his style is remarkable. You feel the presence of a large, generous, electric nature, ranging through all moods of the earnest, the tender, the poetic, and the humorous; and no one has better tact in addressing the people, and enlisting their sympathies.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

M. Flaubert is an author who has won considerable reputation in France by three novels which have already called out a great deal of discussion, both in the country where they were written and elsewhere ; they are Madame Bovary, L’ Éducation Sentimentale, and Salammbô. In all of them there was talent of a certain kind, enough to get itself very much talked about, but chiefly from the novelty of the author in maintaining the paradox that the treatment of any subject, if only clever, could outweigh the most natural objections to a distasteful topic. So much may be said of Madame Bovary and L’Éidueation Sentimentale, at least; Salammbô was an attempt to breathe life into the few fragments we have left of Carthaginian history, and it labored under the misfortune of being, even when successfully done, hardly more than a tour de force. The greater the cleverness shown in patching together scrappy references from Livy and Polybius, the further removed we are from a heartv enjoyment of the story; we are pained whenever we have to verify our admiration by antiquarian investigations, and we are also pained whenever we let everything go by as possible, and make no question about the accuracy of the author. At the best we have only a chastened melodrama. The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which we have before us to-day, is something like this last-named novel, not in construction, but in being a great store-house of facts that lie hidden in lexicons and recondite volumes.

To state what it might he expected that such a book would be, might lead us very far ; most readers would fancy a novel of a sort that would be darkly explained by the adjective French, but in fact we have nothing of the sort. The form which M. Flaubert has chosen is that of a mystery, with the very smallest amount of dramatic action. At the beginning of the book we find Saint Anthony in his cell recalling various events in his life, regretting the companion of his youth, doubting the wisdom of his choice of a religious life, uncertain whether he might not have done better at soldiering, suffering too from hunger and thirst, and, as they attack him, seeing phantom luxuries appear before him ; there is money, too, tempting him to abandon this lonely life and live in comfort among his fellowmen—but they all vanish. Then he grows angry at recalling the way he was treated at the Council of Nice; but more serious temptations await him: the Queen of Sheba appears, inviting him to join her, and narrating the pleasures that await him, after the manner of many painters of the present time, who try to make research usurp the place of pictorial power. It is the semi-antiquarian painters we mean, who are so much the fashion, nowadays, for their pictures of the historical school, which have not any of the enthusiasm of the last century, but a thousand times the accuracy. This quality shows itself throughout the book.; for after the Queen of Sheba is rebuffed, we have a long list of tempters : the King of Evil himself, a very shadowy creation, as if the popular skepticism about his existence had told upon him; and there is also Hilarion, who leads Anthony through an enormous series of visions. Under this guardianship we see representatives of various sects of the early Christians, who come forward and make brief speeches; we see the Roman circus; we have hair-splitting discussions about theological matters; Nebuchadnezzar and Buddha rub elbows; the various Roman gods and goddesses in large numbers appear and then disappear in a vague way before the advance of Christianity, Minerva describes what used to be done at her feasts, Neptune, Mars, and all the others tell their little stories; then the devil appears once more with characteristic speeches, and finally death and luxury appear, sorely tempting the distracted saint, and the end of it all is a most curious nightmare, of vegetables confounding themselves with animals, plants with stones, diamonds shining like eyes, and minerals palpitating. Insects without stomachs continue eating; finally he sees “little globulous moving masses, the size of pins’ heads, and covered with small hairs.” In his madness he cries out, with the voice of one who has solved the problem of spontaneous generation: “ Oh joy ! I have seen the origin of life, I have seen movement begin ! The blood in my veins boils as if it would burst them. I am seized with a yearning to fly, swim, bark, bellow, howl. I should like to have wings, a shell ; to breathe smoke; to carry a trunk; to twist my body; to divide myself everywhere ; to be in everything; to emanate with odors; to grow up like plants ; to flow like water; to vibrate like sound ; to shine like light; to lie hid under all sorts of forms; to penetrate every atom ; to go to the bottom of matter, — to be matter ! ”

At this point of his materialism the long and disturbed night ends, the day breaks, and Saint Anthony makes the sign of the cross and turns to praying again.

To he sure this has a cruder sound in English than in the original French, but we cannot help thinking that what is disappointing in the book lies much deeper than that. If Flaubert meant to be realistic, he could not succeed without having very much more imagination. The liberties he takes are enough to convict him of error in the field of antiquity ; for instance, was Hilarion a Neoplatonist ? Is it within the limits of possibility that such visions could appear ? Has the book any dramatic interest, in other words ? We think this can hardly be claimed. What we have is, rather, an interesting exposition of certain archæological curiosities, put together evidently with considerable care, but also without any real human sympathy. For instance, there is the vanishing of the pagan deities, the account of which is wholly void of poetical interest. Then the vague description of Buddha, does that really touch the readers? Here, too, the knowledge is not very profound.

The art with which it is all elaborated is of course extremely* remarkable. The descriptions are in many ways very complete ; they have an appearance of accuracy, but it is a sort of accuracy that exists for itself, to endure criticism, much more than to call up any feeling in the reader, except one of amazement at the author’s industry. In the whole book there is not a breath of poetry; there is nothing more than this very gilded setting of a dramatic subject, which is very nearly lost under the weight of ornament. Is it an allegory ? Its complexity would seem to forbid this explanation. Does it teach us anything about any possible Saint Anthony? Hardly. No, it would be hard to avoid calling this a very disappointing book. No accuracy in details, no exactness in archæology can breathe life into these visions, which are narrated with more than Pre-Raphaelite distinctness. There is a certain feeling of satisfied curiosity when the reader comes to any familiar touch of information, but for all the rest he lacks complete enjoyment.

The classical and oriental facts which M. Flaubert has collected and displayed, with the label of the Temptation of Saint Anthony, confuse the reader’s mind and make him forget, amid all the turmoil of these visions, what it might be supposed that the book would describe, and the omission of which is so disappointing: and that is the hermit himself. We have but very faint indications of the manner in which the gorgeous panorama affected him. The Sphinx and Chimæra themselves cannot make up to us for this omission. He appears to he seen as one of the dramatis personœ, but he is vaguer than all the rest of the characters; even the unnamable ones are more fullydescribed. As a picture of a possible man the book is a lamentable failure, and as a picture of a certain, definite Saint Anthony it is still more of a failure.

A more fervent imagination would have aided the dramatic part of the book, and would have rendered unnecessary the enormous accumulation of details which of necessity have only a secondary value ; they have the effect of bringing before our minds, not Saint Anthony, whose knowledge of Buddhism must have been extremely limited, but the author, who has exhausted his erudition to interest and amaze, but not to delight us. Such realism appears as but a barren method; it is neither truth nor a probable representation of truth. It fails, us many of the modern pictures of antiquity fail, because while interesting and generally accurate in the curiosities represented, it sins against the spirit of antiquity in carrying back the modern analytic feeling to a scene where it does not belong. As it stands, the book is a most remarkable one; it is a wonderful example of great effort and meagre result, it is an interesting literary curiosity. Full of cleverness as it is. it leaves the reader as little improved as mere cleverness always does.