Recent Literature

THE life of Dr. Macleod¹ is one of the. most interesting and affecting biographies of a year singularly prolific in important memoirs. It is written by his brother, the Rev. Donald Macleod, and beautifully written ; with great tenderness, and at the same time a most dignified restraint of eulogy. Dr. Macleod’s reputation as a Scottish churchman, a genial and agreeable author, and one of the few really great and persuasive preachers of the age, has been extensive for a generation. The present volumes abundantly explain his power. It seems to have been largely the result of temperament, — of a cordial and splendid combination of qualities, animal, mental, affectional, and spiritual, which is at once intensely human and especially Scotch. We meet with kindred natures constantly in the annals of the Celtic race in Scotland : in scores of old-time heroes, in Burns, in John Brown, in Walter Scott, in the hearty, haughty, but ever vigorous and delightful men of the Noctes Ambrosianæ. And we can no more explain why this warm and wealthy temperament should flower so profusely upon those bleak fells, than why the dreariest deserts and the most uncouth shrubs in the world should yield the delicate and gorgeous cactus flower. Given that “ principle within ” which seems almost to be a Scotchman’s birthright, tending always to restrain license and subdue self-will, and religious faith finds in these natures a peculiarly favorable soil. The very ardor of their vitality, their keen realization and enjoyment of the present life, make it inconceivable to them that life should be extinguished. Their fond love for home and kindred and natural beauty, all the faces and the places that are seen, overflows into the spaces of the unseen, and furnishes these also with objects of affection. The world and the flesh are to them so palpable and powerful, that a struggle with these forces becomes heroic, and allures to imitation by the magnetism which belongs to all perilous and doubtful conflict. Dr. Macleod’s religious life seems not so much a definite consecration, as a progressive and

finally triumphant victory of the soul over the senses.

He was born in 1812, at Campbelltown in the Highlands, and bred up in the “plain living and high thinking ” of a Scotch manse. At the age of twelve he was sent to Morven, to an uncle who was also a minister, to learn Gaelic and fit himself to be a Highland clergyman, the lot for which he was destined by his father. After two years passed amid the picturesque scenes and yet more picturesque character of that classic region, years which his memory glorified ever afterwards, he entered the University of Glasgow, where he took a four years’ course of arts, going thence at the age of nineteen to study theology at Edinburgh. Dr. Chalmers, who was then professor there, and against whom young Macleod was so soon to be ranged in opposition, had sufficient respect for his character and ability to recommend him to Mr. Preston of Moreby, as a suitable tutor to accompany his young son for a year’s study in Weimar. Indeed, Macleod’s intimate associations in college were invariably with the best minds and those destined to future distinction ; yet he was not himself a remarkable scholar, and seems to have been valued for the warmth of his affection and his delightful and abundant wit more than for his mental activity. John Shairp, now principal of Saint Andrews, writes of him in those days: “ It did not need any such bonds of early association to make a young man take at once to Norman. To see him, hear him, converse with him, was enough. He was overflowing with generous, ardent, contagious impulse. Brimful of imagination, sympathy, buoyancy, humor, drollery, and affectionateness, I never know any one who contained in himself so large and varied an armful of the humanities. Himself a very child of Nature, he touched Nature and human life at every point. There was nothing human that was without interest for him, nothing great or noble to which his heart did not leap up instinctively. In those days, what Hazlitt says of Coleridge was true of him, ' He talked on forever, and you wished to hear him talk forever.’ Since that day I have met and known intimately a good many men more or less remarkable and original. Some of them were stronger on this side, some on that, than Norman; but not one of all contained in himself such a variety of gifts and qualities, such elasticity, such boundless fertility of pure nature, apart from all he got from books and culture. On his intellectual side, imagination and humor were his strongest qualities, both of them working on a base of strong common sense and knowledge of human nature. On the moral side, sympathy, intense sympathy with all humanity, was the most manifest, with a fine aspiration that hated the mean and selfish and went out to whatever things were most worthy of a man’s love. Deep affection to family and friends, affection that could not bear coldness or stiff reserve, but longed to love and he loved ; and if there was in it a touch of the old Highland clannishness, one did not like it the less for that. In after years Dr. Macleod used often bitterly to lament that he had not better improved his early opportunities for study; but it may be doubted whether a deeper knowledge of books would better have fitted him for the great work which he was to do upon the hearts of men.

It is easy to see how fascinating to a nature like this, at the age of twenty-four, must have been the brilliant society of Weimar at a time when the after-glow of Goethe’s genius yet illuminated the sky, within one year only after Thackeray’s eyes beheld the master in dear little Weimar town.”Here, besides imbibing the congenial lesson of the uses of art and luxury, Norman encountered at the hands, or perhaps the eyes, of the beautiful and famous Melanie von S—his first sentimental experience ; light and visionary as the attachment was, it seems to have withheld him for many years from marriage, which he would naturally have sought early, and “ awakened,” says his biographer, “ a world of aesthetic feelings which long afterward breathed like a subtle essence through the common atmosphere of his life. When working against vice and poverty in his parish in Ayrshire, during the heats of the Disruption controversy, amid prosaic cares as well as in the enjoyment of poetry, art, and song, Melanie haunted him as the sweet embodiment of happy memories, the spirit of gracefulness and culture. Yet, despite all these subtle allurements, the religious faith of the young Scotchman remained unshaken by the rampant rationalism of the German capital, and he returned to his theological studies at Edinburgh and his installment in the little parish of Loudoun, with deepened convictions and a hardly sobered enthusiasm for a preacher’s calling.”

To follow in detail the story of his noble, cheerful, arduous ministry among the weavers of Loudoun and Dalkeith, and the struggling, suffering poor of the immense Barony parish at Glasgow, would he impossible in a brief notice. It should he read by all who care for the records of sincere and selfdevoted lives, in his brother’s graphic narrative, illustrated by copious extracts from his own self-searching, but certainly never morbid journals, and from those full and cheery letters, bristling with anecdote and droll caricature, which must have been so precious to his friends. In 1843, when he was thirty-one years of age, came the famous controversy which ended in the disruption of the ancient kirk of Scotland, and young Macleod, like his father, remained loyal to the old establishment. His heart was wrung by the separation from his early and beloved teacher, Chalmers, and some of the greater revolutionists, and he strove hard for a spirit of gentleness and tolerance toward all. But there was something essentially repugnant to his high and free spirit in what he could not help regarding as the cheap and somewhat ostentatious martyrdom of many of Chalmers’s followers ; and all his life long the things he had hardest work not to hate virulently were the crabbed and Pharisaic asceticism, the Sabbatarianism, teetotalism, and all the other exaggerated and unlovely isms which found so ready an asylum in the dissenting kirk.

In 1845, he visited Canada and Nova Scotia on a sort of mission tour among the scattered members of the old kirk living in exile there, and this is how he found his way to the hearts of the expatriated Highlanders. “ While walking the upper deck ” (of a steamer bound to Toronto) “ I heard a number of voices joining in a Gaelic chorus. I went down and found a dozen Highlanders. After they had finished, the following conversation took place, I speaking in high English: ‘ Pray what language is that ? ’ ‘ Gaelic, sir.’ ‘ Where is that spoken ? ’ ‘ In the Highlands of Scotland.' ‘ Is it a language ? ’ ‘ It’s the only true langidge ! English is no langidge at all, at all! ’ ‘ It. must be banished. It is savage.’ ‘It’s no you or any other will banish it.’ ‘ Pray let me hear you speak a sentence of it. Address a question to me.' ‘Co as a thanaig thu ? ’ (Where do you come from ? )

' Thanaig mis as an Eilean Sgianach.’ (I come from the Isle of Skye.) ‘ Oh, fheudail! Se Gael tha am!’ (Oh goodness, he’s a Highlander! ) These men had never been in Scotland. They were all Glengarry men and were of course delighted to meet me.”

Within a year after his return from this North American tour, Dr. Macleod engaged with enthusiasm in the formation of the Evangelical Alliance, and was sent by that earnest but short-lived organization on another mission tour in Prussian Poland and Silesia. Every year now added to his influence, increasing both his labors and his fame. In 1854, while taking his autumnal rest at Crathie, he was summoned to Balmoral to preach before the queen and Prince Albert, and received the appointment of one of her Majesty’s chaplains. But it was the formal and naturally formidable visit of condolence which he paid to the queen and her children after the death of the Prince Consort in 1860, which seems to have been the true commencement of an almost intimate acquaintance with the various members of the royal family, which continued through the remaining years of his life and was characterized on both sides by the utmost dignity, simplicity, and sincerity. The letter which the queen in her turn wrote after the death of Dr. Macleod to his brother (the author of his memoir), despite its third-personal clumsiness, and a certain feebleness of expression, is full of heartfelt sorrow.

In 1860, Dr. Macleod assumed the editorship of Good Words, and added to his arduous parochial labors the conduct of an immense correspondence and the preparation of frequent contributions, which soon made his name familiar beyond the broad circle of his personal influence. The Old Lieutenant, The Highland Parish, Peeps at the Far East, and the charming story of the Starling, were all reprinted from the pages of Good Words. He allowed his waning life to become yearly more closely crowded, under the confessed pressure of the solemn admonition, “ Work while the day lasts, for the night cometh.” But amid the hurry of its outward activities, the hidden life was steadily deepening and broadening. Whatever in his earlier phraseology might have seemed to savor of cant fell away from his fervent speech as the husks fall from ripened grain. More and more he identified himself with that class of English thinkers, at once so serious and so generous, whose labor of love it has been to try to reconcile the old dispensation and the new, — with Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Dean Stanley, Arthur Helps, and the friend of his own boyhood, Principal Shairp. He did not fear to face the real issues of the day. “ They are squabbling,” he cried sadly in his last year, “about the United Presbyterian, Free Church, or Established, when the world is asking whether Christ is risen from the dead.” For himself he seems never to have doubted that resurrection nor its power, but to have believed that Christ had indeed become the first fruits of the great and dear multitude who sleep. Yet his charity embraced even those who had never believed or who had ceased to believe it. He pleaded for the spirits in the prison of Hades before a congregation trained in the straitest sect of the old Calvinism. When they sent him to India to examine the workings of the evangelical mission system, his ready sympathy showed him so clearly the Oriental point of view that he began at once to doubt the validity and efficacy of the old missionary methods. “ Was it necessary,” he asked, in the last public speech he ever made, when he resigned the presidency or couvenership of the India mission, “ was it necessary to give those minute and abstract statements of doctrine to Orientals, whose habits of mind and spiritual affinities might lay better hold on other aspects of divine truth, and who might mold a theology for themselves, not less Christian, but which would be Indian, and not English or Scotch ? The block of ice, clear and cold, the beautiful product of our Northern climes, will at the slightest touch freeze the warm lips of the Hindoo. Why insist that he must take that or nothing ? ” And in the last entry in his journal made only a few days later, June 3, 1872, after recording his sixtieth birthday, his mind recurs to another aspect of the same strenuous question. “ Where is the germ of the church of the future ? In what church ? In what creed ? In what forms of government ? It may come from India, as the first came from the East. But all our old forms are effete as old oaks, although young ones may grow out of them. Neither Calvinism nor Presbyterianism, nor Thirty-nine Articles, nor High Churchism, nor Low Churchism, nor any existing organization, can be the church of the future. May God give us patience to wait! ”

Men who have labored, and especially who have felt as much as Dr. Macleod, are old at sixty, and he had long felt himself to be so. The trip to India had developed the dormant seeds of disease, and he was beginning to suffer greatly. “ I have not felt well for fourteen years,” is his pathetic afterthought, when the physicians have finally induced him to give up everything and take complete rest. But the order came too late. He had once said that he never felt like praying to be delivered from sudden death, but only that he might be ready for it. And so when the end came stealthily, in sleep, before the friends had dispersed who had gathered to celebrate his birthday, those whose grief was keenest looked upon it as an answer to his prayer, and found nothing awful or unnatural in the abrupt setting of that beauteous orb, whose shining had been ever more and clearer until the supreme moment when it was hidden from human ken.

—It is very desirable that the problems presented by the science of political economy should be widely discussed in this country, and that some at least of the discussions should be had on a plane suited to the comprehension of those who have not made a study of the science; of ordinary people, in short, including those whose time is chiefly occupied with daily toil in our workshops, but who have votes to throw when the days of election recur, and who are accordingly powerful agents in determining the course of legislation, state and national. If the phrase, “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” possesses some degree of truth, it is chiefly applicable to matters of this sort. We are accordingly glad to see the volume ² in which Mr. Gladden has collected a series of sermons (from the hint in his preface we take them to be such) preached at his church in Springfield to a congregation, many of whom, he tolls us, " were mechanics and operatives who could not be familiar with all the current treatises on social science, and who therefore were not offended by instruction of a somewhat elementary character.” He says further, " I think I know my audience pretty well. The greater part of my life has been spent among working people, in working with them or working for them. I count among them some of my most valued friends; I know their ways of living and of thinking; and I have tried to make these discussions intelligible and helpful to them.” The various

chapters of the book betray modesty and earnestness on the part of the writer; there is nothing very profound in them, but their views are sound, and it appears to have been his aim to regard the topics successively considered from the point of observation likely to be taken by his hearers, and to carry these along with him while he unfolded popular fallacies likely to deceive them and to cause mischievous results. There is a strong religious flavor in the book; Mr. Gladden is fond of resorting to citations from the Bible, and he introduces many happy illustrations from that sacred source. Thus, in his first chapter, on The Duty and Discipline of Work, he points out that the same commandment which prescribes rest on the seventh day positively enjoins labor on the other days of the week : “ Six days shalt thou labor.” This mode of reasoning is well known to be effective, at least in this part of the country, among our native-born population, to whom the language of the Bible has been familiar from their earliest years. No better service can be done than by pointing out the advantages of industry, sobriety, and frugality, and by inducing the laboring classes to seek the improvement of their condition by such means rather than by agitations, strikes, and the doubtful expedients of the trades unions. Mr. Gladden does not omit giving a chapter on The Duties of Employers, and closes with a picture of The Future of Labor, in which he deprecates all visionary schemes that partake of an agrarian or communistic character, a great national loan-agency, or kindred delusions, but expresses himself hopefully with regard to the principle of coöperation, to be brought into use by slow degrees.

— A more ponderous volume, in which some of the same problems are discussed, is that of Professor Walker,³ all of whose claims to recognition by the public we do not give, confining ourselves to the mention that he inherited from his father, the late Amasa Walker, of North Brookfield, the taste for the special studies which have given him reputation in his work as superintendent of the ninth census of the United States, and as professor of political economy and history in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College. Professor Walker’s discussions of the topics he has selected are more elaborate and profound than those of Mr, Gladden; but it is noteworthy that he manifests the same willingness to consider them fairly from the point of view of the greater number interested in them, that is, of the wages class, to use the designation he employs. Political economy is nothing without definitions. Professor Walker begins by setting forth that all the questions of political economy may both conveniently and appropriately be grouped under four titles : the production, the distribution, the exchange, and the consumption of wealth. Wealth is exchanged when the producer and the consumer are different persons; and this whether different persons have united in the production of it or not. On the other hand, wealth must be distributed when different persons having separate legal interests unite in production ; and this whether the product is to be exchanged or not. The author considers that this distinction between exchange and distribution, although not important in the general theory of political economy, has an immediate application to the problem of wages, which is a question in the distribution of wealth; and while in treating of the production of wealth it is necessary to carefully distinguish industrial functions, which has been done with success and completeness by the systematic writers, Professor Walker maintains that in treating of the distribution of wealth we need rather to distinguish industrial classes, recognizing industrial functions only as they serve to characterize such classes. It does not follow that because labor and capital perform parts which can be clearly distinguished in production, they will receive separate shares in the distribution of the product. That will depend on whether these functions are or are not unitied in the same persons. Accordingly he is not satisfied with the classification which has heretofore been made by the systematic writers, resulting from carrying forward into the questions of distribution their analysis of the processes of production. Such an analysis naturally recognizes five classes of laborers: First, the class who work for themselves, by themselves, either on their own land (the “ peasant proprietor” of Europe and the American “ farmer”) or in mechanical trades. Second, the tenant occupier of land, like the cottar of Ireland or the ryot of India, who receives the whole produce, subject only to the deduction of rent for the natural powers of the soil. Third, the class of persons working for hire, such as domestic servants, soldiers, and clergymen, who are paid out of the revenue of their employers, and are not employed with any reference to the profits of production. Fourth, the class of persons working for hire, whether in agriculture, in trade, or in mechanical pursuits, who are paid out of the product of their industry, and are employed with reference to the profits of production. And fifth, the employers themselves, in so far as they personally conduct and control business operations, their remuneration being styled the “ wages of supervision and management.” To this generalization, so far as it relates to the discussion of the problem of wages, Professor Walker objects, pointing out that only the third and fourth classes do in fact receive a remuneration for their services distinct from that which is received for the use of capital, being the only classes which receive “wages” in the ordinary meaning of that word ; and that the fourth and fifth classes combine persons having interests as strongly opposed as human interests could well become. In his twelfth chapter he continues the process of elimination, insisting that the wages class includes only those who are employed. The employers, the whole class of peasant proprietors or independent farmers, master workmen purchasing their own materials, as well as the cottars and ryots, forming the vast majority of the human race, are thus excluded. Next he counts out all those who, though employed, are employed on shares. It is of the essence of wages that they are stipulated in amount. He also excludes, although with an expression of doubt with regard to receiving general assent for the proposition, those persons who are supported out of the revenues of those who employ them; giving to such persons the name of “the salary or stipend class,” of which he mentions the domestic servant, as perhaps furnishing the best illustration, and cites Adam Smith’s remark that “a man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers ; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.” Unless the reason for employing others is found in the expectation of a profit to the employer out of the production in which the laborer is to he engaged, he does not find in such employment the true sign of the wages class ; justifying the broad statement, “ No profits, no wages.” The wages class proper, therefore, according to Professor Walker’s definition, includes all persons who are employed in production with a view to the profit of their employers, and are paid at stipulated rates. Even with these limitations, he says, of the eighty millions of English-speaking people, probably three fourths, certainly two thirds, subsisting on wages, come within the definition, and furnish material enough for a volume.

The province of his work thus defined and limited, the principal doctrine which Professor Walker sets himself to refute is the proposition that there exists a certain wages-fund, irrespective of the numbers and industrial quality of the laboring classes, constituting the sole source from which wages can at any time be drawn. Taking the proposition in the terms in which it has heretofore been enunciated, we think it will generally be admitted that our author has been successful in his attack upon it; and with it falls the corollary that the average amount of wages to be received by each laborer is precisely determined by the ratio existing between this wages-fund and the number of laborers, or, as it is sometimes described, between capital and population. Professor Walker adduces a variety of illustrations to prove that wages are in fact paid, not out of capital, but out of profits. He admits, however, that frequently, if not in most cases, they must be advanced, wholly or in part, out of capital; and in this admission, perhaps, his opponents may find a large concession to the basis of their position.

Professor Walker also combats the doctrines that competition is so far perfect that the laborer as producer always realizes the highest wages which the employer can afford to pay, or else, as consumer, is recompensed in the lower price of commodities for any injury he may chance to suffer as producer ; and that in the organization of modern industrial society, the laborer and the capitalist are together sufficient for production, the actual employer of labor being regarded as the capitalist, or as the stipendiary agent of the capitalist. In the enforcement of his arguments he lays great stress on the necessity of insuring the mobility of the laborers, and gives due prominence to the position of the entrepreneur, standing between the capitalist and the laborer, making his terms with each, and directing the courses and methods of industry with almost unquestioned authority. Incapable employers live at the expense of the laboring class. Nothing costs the working classes so dearly in the long run as the bad or merely commonplace conduct of business. Our space will not permit us, nor if this were otherwise would we willingly assume the task, to follow in detail Professor Walkers course of reasoning under the definition he has laid down, in support of the propositions to which he attaches importance. His style is well adapted to his subject ; it is lucid, sometimes diffuse, but this is recognized as a fault on the right side in a treatise on political economy. His points are illustrated by a wealth of information of varied range, the collection of which gives proof of strong powers of observation. He does not scorn the occasional use of a pertinent anecdote, as the subjoined extract, which carries us back to the year 1645, will show: —

“ This notion of a see-saw between wages and profits is well hit off in a story which Governor Winthrop tells: ‘ I may upon this occasion report a passage between one of Rowley and his servant. The master, being forced to sell a pair of oxen to pay his servant his wages, told his servant he could keep him no longer, not knowing how to pay him the next year. The servant answered him that he would serve him for more of his cattle. But how shall I do (saith the master) when all my cattle are gone I The servant replied, You shall then serve me, and so you may have your cattle again ! ’ Surely, if a man becomes an employer in industry only because he is a capitalist, the servant in this story was not more of a wag than a political economist.”(Pages 240, 241.)

Professor Walker of course has his chapter upon coöperation, which he defines as “union in production, upon equal terms; democracy introduced into labor.” The chapter is well written, and fairly explains the principles upon which the doctrine of coöperation is based, and admits their excellence in theory. He points out three advantages which would result from the system if fairly established, in addition to those which the wages class generally contemplate : First, it would by the very terms of the system obviate strikes; second, the workman would be stimulated to greater industry and greater carefulness; and third, he would be incited to frugality. But the distinction which our author has everywhere insisted upon between the capitalist and the entrepreneur, and the importance which he attaches to the function of the latter, as standing between the capitalist and the laborer, make him little sanguine of the success of the scheme of coöperation in productive industry. A manager would be essential to the successful conduct of the business ; this manager would be found with difficulty, and it would be hard for the workmen to see largo amounts taken out of the product of the labor for his remuneration. Our author finds the more hopeful path of progress for the immediate future in the reduction of profits and consequent enhancement of wages, through increasing intelligence, sobriety, and frugality on the part of the wages class, securing them a prompt, easy, and certain resort to the best market. He adds that there are of course some departments of industry where the services of the entrepreneur can be more easily dispensed with than in others, and that in these coöperation under good auspices may achieve no doubtful success; and he finds some words of encouragement for the plan of partial cooperation, by which the employer admits his workmen to a participation to a certain extent in the profits of the business, while retaining the full responsibility of its conduct.

Professor Walker proceeds to show, however, that the objections to productive cooperation do not apply with the same force to distributive coöperation, or the supplying to the wages class of the necessaries of life through agencies established by themselves. Although the principle is by no means unknown in this country, and has been acted upon to a considerable extent, the “ union stores ” in our cities and towns have not generally assumed the position of importance which similar establishments enjoy in London, where they receive the support of almost all well-to-do people, who find a decided advantage in dealing with them. The principles upon which their success rests are simple, and are well explained by Professor Walker.

Not purporting to be a complete treatise upon political economy, but a discussion of only a part of that large subject, the book abridges considerably the proportions of the particular topic selected. We have no complaint to make of this; the science can he perfected only by a thorough analysis of its component parts. It is, however, apparent that the present necessity of these separate discussions goes far to discourage the study of political economy by ordinary people, and leads to frequent impatient expressions of the opinion that there is really no such thing. It certainly seems as if each new book that appears, while it may add somewhat to our resources, failed to complete anything. We can only hope that we are by degrees coming nearer to the' perfection of the science when the whole of its principles may be set forth in a text-book no bigger than a school arithmetic.

— Señor Guerra, Baron de Sant' Anna, Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, has done us good service by the publication, in English, of his Notes on Portugal.⁴ Secluded as that little kingdom is from the usual routes of pleasure travel, and debarred by our tariff from commercial intercourse with us, less is known here of Portugal than perhaps of any other nation of equal importance in Europe. We are too apt to confuse her history with that of Spain, from whose western flank her narrow territory has been sliced ; and our knowledge of her literature, is confined pretty much to the dissertations of Bouterwek, Sismondi, Schlegel, and the like.

Portugal ought to be better known. Her history is most interesting and instructive. Her modern career in the pathway of freedom has been more glorious and inspiring than that of any other European nation. Site is to-day as free as England. With an elective house of deputies, having absolute control over the public purse; a peerage which, though hereditary, descends only upon abundant evidence of good character and capacity on the part of the claimant; with a responsible ministry, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, and religions toleration, Portugal has approached, within the last forty years, very near to the republican model.

The condensed information given us by Baron de Sant' Anna concerning his interesting country is, of course, entirely trustworthy, and his high position in Portuguese councils has enabled him to gather a mass of important data and statistics which have an especial value for students. Beginning with an aperçu of Portuguese history, the author gives us, in a brief, sententious method, chapters on the language and literature of Portugal; its social life, industries, educational institutions, its army and navy, its frame of government; with descriptions of its famous vineyards and its wide-scattered colonies, and discussions of many other topics illustrative of the present condition of the country. It seems to us that the work must take rank as an almost indispensable handbook on Portugal, and that the author has set an excellent example to other foreign ministers, who would in telling us about their own countries promote good feeling and a wider fraternity on the part of ours.

— The success of this series of books, which give readers of English the gist of the classics, seems to be established, to judge from the fact that a number of new authors are about to be added to the list which already seemed complete. The first of these, which is the volume about Livy’s history,⁵ is now published. The work is well done, and will be found of service not only by the reader anxious to renew his knowledge of half-forgotten lore, and by that vague person, the general reader, who, we may suppose for the occasion, has neglected the study of the ancient tongues, but also, possibly, by the young student of Latin, who by reading this book would get a notion that Livy’s history was full of something beside subjunctives and elusive dates. This synopsis is interesting and complete; moreover, the editor has added some original matter of his own, treating of Livy’s position as a historian, and of the relative value of different parts of his work. In short, though necessarily hardly more than superficial from the nature of the requirements, the tone of the book is still scholarly. No one will find it out of place in his library.

— Mr. Scudder’s novel⁶ will be apt to have a double effect on readers of it. Opening spiritedly, with a promise of picturesqueness and an agreeable strain of humor that raise considerable expectations, it does not eventually fulfill its prospect. Mr. Scudder has hardly, we think, made the most of his opportunity for amusing or romantic incident, offered by the close juxtaposition of the houses of the court in which bis persons dwell; and a more serious obstacle to the interest of his story is,the want of a sufficiently deep-seated individuality in the characters. Some of them, as Paul Le Clear, Dr. Chocker, and Mr. Manlius, are marked out with decided emphasis; but the peculiarities touched are chiefly on the surface, and these three people are subordinates in the plot. The chief actors are vaguely outlined, and neither repel nor attract us. It is an interesting speculation how far this may be due to Mr. Scudder’s practice in a department of writing where he has become widely known, that of fiction for children ; for this sort of writing probably develops the fancy more than the formative imagination. But there are two excellent tendencies in the present novel. One is that of the dry humor shown, for example, in the author’s amusing treatment of the four German musicians ; the other, which is more important, is his reliance on simple sentiment as an element of interest. Mr. Scudder’s success as a novelist probably depends on his development of these traits and on his learning to penetrate into character rather more boldly than he has here done.