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THE Diary of Judge Sewall,¹ in the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has been used by Holmes and other historians, but is now made available to all students by its publication and by the valuable apparatus of notes and introduction furnished by the editors. The entire diary covers the period from 1674 to 1729, the present volume, the first of the series, reaching to 1700. Sewall graduated at Harvard in 1671, and three years later took his master’s degree. It was while in the service of the college that his diary begins, and the first few pages intimate the hesitation which he showed in choosing between the clerical profession and a secular life. After that the reader follows him in his business, his family life, his social relations, and to some extent in his observation of public affairs, but it is to be said that the diary is valuable rather for the incidental light which it throws upon contemporaneous history than for any very direct illustration. It is not difficult to define the intention of such a journal. It is a Family Book. Probably such books are comparatively rare in our cities nowadays, but forty or fifty years ago it was a common matter for a merchant or professional gentleman to set up a family book at the beginning of his active life, in which to record, with more or less reflection, the events which collected about himself and family. The Boston of Sewall’s time was a vigorous community, having all the interests, in miniature, which attach to an independent state. It had its little college, its little congress, its little court, its little commerce, and even its little revolution. The family was an integer in this community, and the diary of such a family could scarcely fail to touch on the notable people of Boston, to refer to the questions that were uppermost, to imply customs, and to reflect local characteristics; but after all its main object would be to record in brief notes the daily experience of the family, the births, marriages, deaths, accidents, sicknesses, the sermons heard, the visitors who called, the special news brought of absent members, and so far as it was the memorandum book of the head of the family, his business engagements and personal reflections.

Such a diary assumes, moreover, the family for its readers. The persons and events are named to those who already know them, and it is left for future editors to open the mysteries of relationship and to explain allusions which were entirely intelligible at the time. Hence it seems very unlikely that Judge Sewall had any thought whatever of future publication. Certainly, there is a wide difference between his diary and that of Governor Winthrop, which was clearly felt by the writer to be of the nature of annals. This Helps to explain also the absence of anything more than fragmentary reference to the witchcraft delusion, with which Sewall’s name is connected in so painfully noble a way. The writer, we may suppose, was too full of the matter to journalize it in a notebook. There are indeed one or two pathetic references to the matter. Under April 11, 1692, he writes: “ Went to Salem, where, in the Meeting-house, the persons accused of Witchcraft were examined; was a very great Assembly ; ’t was awfull to see how the afflicted persons were agitated. Mr. Noyes pray’d at the beginning, and Mr. Higginson concluded. [In the margin :] Vae, Vae, Vae, Witchcraft.” Later, he notes a fast “respecting the Witchcraft, Drought, etc.,” and one at the house of Captain Alden, “ upon his account,” who was in Boston jail at that time, awaiting trial for witchcraft. He enters the hanging of Burrough and others, writing in the margin, “ Dolefull Witchcraft!” and concludes, “Mr. Mather says they all died by a Righteous Sentence. Mr. Burrough by his Speech, Prayer, protestation of his Innocence, did much move unthinking persons, which occasions their speaking hardly concerning his being executed.” Four years later there is a brief entry under December 24, 1696 : “ Sam recites to me in Latin, Mat. 12, from the 6th to the end of the 12th v. The 7th verse did awfully bring to mind the Salem Tragedie.” (“If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.”) It was three weeks after this, when weighed down by private affliction also, that Judge Sewall put up his celebrated petition on the Fast Day. It is recorded in the Diary, with the brief note at the head : “Copy of the Bill I put up on the Fast day; giving it to Mr. Willard as he pass’d by. and standing up at the reading of it, and bowing when finished ; in the Afternoon.” There must be some of our readers who have not seen this " Bill,” read thus before the congregation of which the judge was a member, and we give it for its own noble pathos, and for the commentary which it affords upon the temper of the times immediately following the tragedy,— a temper not always taken into account by writers who are quick to discover the reproach which the delusion brings upon Massachusetts : —

“ Samuel Sewall, sensible, of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family ; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted upon the opening of the late comission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem (to which the order for this Day relates) he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and shame of it, Asking pardon of men, And especially desiring prayers that God, who has an Unlimited Authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins personal and Relative : And according to his infinite Benignity, and Sovereignty, Not Visit the sin of him, or of any other, upon himself or any of his, nor upon the Land : But that He would powerfully defend him against all Temptations to Sin for the future ; and vouchsafe him the efficacious, saving Conduct of his Word and Spirit.” There is a subject for a historical painter! — the upright judge making this humble confession in the sight of all the congregation, while the minister reads it from the pulpit.

The student will find many exceedingly interesting notes by Sewall upon occurrences and people, but we are not willing to give up the book to specialists. Any one generally at home in New England history wilt find his account in reading the book for the many unconscious exhibitions of personal character, and of that typical New England character which seems at first so clearly cut on the pages of history, yet reveals itself in every new book like this with fresh value and with touches of nature that forbid our regarding it with too impersonal a criticism. We have been struck, for example, with that fascination of death which becomes a vulgar curiosity in uneducated countrymen, but rises into a singular importance in the nature of such a man as Judge Sewall. At the time of the entry just cited, on Christmas Day, 1696, he buries a little daughter, and makes this note respecting the tomb : “ ’T was wholly dry, and I went at noon to see in what order things were set; and there I was entertain'd with a view of, and converse with, the Coffins of my dear Father Hull, Mother Hull, Cousin Quinsey, and Six Children : for the little posthumous Was now took up and set in upon that that stands on John’s ; so are three, one upon another twice, on the bench at the end. My Mother ly’s on a lower bench at the end, with head to her Husband’s head : and I order’d little Sarah to be set on her Grandmother’s feet. 'T was an awfull yet pleasing Treat; Having said, The Lord knows who shall be brought hither next, I came away.” Apparently no one dies— certainly not " Eliza, Scot, a good ancient Virgin ” — without his making a note of it : “ Wednesday Dec² 9th 1685. Our neighbour Gamaliel Wait eating his Breakfast well, went to do something in his Orchard, where Serg³ Pell dwells, there found him Self not well and went into Pell’s his Tenant’s House, and there dyed extroain suddenly about Noon, and then was carried home in a chair, and means used to fetch him again, but in vain : To the Children startled about him he said, here is a sudden Change, or there will be a great Change, to that purpose. Was about 87 years old. and yet strong and hearty ; had lately several new Teeth. People in the Street much startled at this good Man’s sudden Death. Gov⁴ Hinkley sent for me to Mr. Rawson’s just as they were sending a great Chair to carry him home. Satterday, Dec⁵ 12, ’85. Father Wait buried : Magistrates and Ministers had Gloves, There heard of the Death of Capt. Hutchinson’s child by Convulsions, and so pass to the Funeral of little Samuel Hutchinson about six weeks old, where also had a pair of Funeral Gloves.” It is surely with pardonable pride that in one place he makes a minute,— “an account of some I have been a Bearer to,” — a list of thirty persons within seven or eight years. Their ages are given, and against each is written, " Ring,” “ Ring, Scarf,” “ Scarf, Gloves,” as the case may be, with “Nothing” occasionally, — a ghostly list of funeral trumpery, with these two or three protesting Nothings to represent “ Friends are requested not to send flowers ” of these later days.

There is no great or small in such a diary. The governor’s hat blows off, — " hath a new Border which began to wear Catechising day or Sabbath last, as I take it; ” one of his children throws something at his sister “ upon which, and for his playing at Prayertime, and eating when Return Thanks, I whipd him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call’d by his Grandmother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle : which gave me the sorrowfull remembrance of Adam’s carriage.” His persistent struggles to put down the abomination of periwigs in the community ; his uneasiness at every encroachment of the Church of Englahd, together with a half-simple curiosity about the service; his innocent but vain endeavors to substitute numbers for the heathen names of months; his habit of discovering divine judgments at every turn, —all find expression in the Diary. A portion, too, covers a voyage to England, and he shows himself a keen observer and naïve commenter. What could be more delightfully childish than his attempt to write down for use at home the drum-beat which he heard at tattoo ?

“ Dūrrera dūm Dūrrera dūm Dūrrera dūm Dūrrera dūm

Dūm dūm Dūm dūm Dūrrera dūm Dūm dūm Dūm dūm Dūrrera dūm,”

We have only hinted at some of the curiosities of this very readable volume. No one can read it steadily without carrying away a pretty distinct impression of the bustling community in which the diarist lived, and a real respect for the strong man who presents himself in it in his négligée costume. The editors have shown admirable care in the selection of points for annotation, and in the elucidation of difficulties. Their work is so scholarly and fresh, the occasional humor betraying their lively perception of the different values of the book, that we heartily wish it had been shown in two important labors. The introduction might well have brought together for the reader the continuous facts of Sewall’s life, — possibly this is reserved for a later volume,— and the index should have been topical. The labor in this latter case would have been considerable, and it migh t have been difficult to keep a topical index within bounds as to length; yet surely there might have been some clue in it to the subjects for which one now has to hunt in perplexity after a reading of the book.

— In this very readable and really use-

ful volume⁶ Professor Boyesen has written tolerably full lives of Goethe and Schiller, with analyses of their principal writings, and, what is of more especial importance, a fairly complete account of the two parts of Faust. The biographies are so satisfactory that the one on Goethe may well be read along-side of that of Lewes ; while that on Schiller, which is written with incomparably more ease and delicacy of touch, deserves warm commendation as a thorough and interesting monograph. If we have any fault to find with what the author has to say about Goethe, it is with his almost monotonous praise of that great man. He has drawn so largely from German commentators on Goethe and his immortal poem that the reader cannot help feeling the narrow bounds in which German literature has been confined, and the pettiness of much of the Germans’ enthusiasm for even the faults of their greatest writer. They would be thoroughly justified if there were no other literatures extant, if no other people had poets, —for it is, after all, by poets that the measure of a literature is taken ; but one cannot help wondering what the annotators and lecturers of that part of the world would have made of Shelley, for instance, if that author had been born of a German mother. Instead of having two or three editors who clapperclaw one another about the punctuation of his verses, and a clique who preach him to a horde of barbarians, there would be a host of writers pointing out that by this poem he meant that, that the skylark was symbolic of the other, and so on. And by this no disrespect is intended to Shelley or to Goethe, nor yet to those who have written about them. It is meant to call attention to the fact that not only have brave men lived before Agamemnon, but that there were some men of courage marching in the same line with that undoubted hero. What the German commentators, and Mr. Boyesen after them, seem to forget is that, while many of Goethe’s loveliest poems and wisest thoughts have all the charm—the undying charm — of lovely, fresh fountains, there are great sandy wastes of verbiage to which they owe part of their merit; they are like these same fountains in a huge desert. The amount that Goethe wrote of what is really unreadable is recognized only by the yawns of readers, or whispered irreverently by them to one another; there is no acknowledgment of it by Germans,— shall we say they do not perceive it?— and it has become a usage to accept everything that Goethe wrote without a murmur. Ridicule of his work will not be fair, but veneration “this side idolatry” is only just. There are signs of his weakness in Egmont, for instance, in spite of the charming bits this play contains, and the second part of Faust seems full of it.

There is no greater proof of how far Goethe removed himself from human life and human interest in the conclusion of his greatest poem than the fact that Faust redeems himself from his load of sin, and baffles the devil,—by what? By draining a piece of land ! Wordsworth at his prosiest could never have devised so stale, flat, and unprofitable a conclusion. This is harnessing Pegasus to a tip-cart with a vengeance. There is of course the underlying truth that work, and work for the benefit of others, is an ennobling thing, and draining land is a better occupation than seducing Margaret; but could the imagination be more willfully superseded by invention ? All the boards of agriculture in the world cannot prove this to be a fit subject of poetry. And yet Goethe has adorned this didactic lesson with every charm of art; nowhere has this master of form written more graceful lines, so far as the form is concerned, than here; his Euphorion springs to the most delicious of metres; but it is like what architecture has been defined to be, — frozen music.

In fact, most of the first part of Faust deserves all that can be said of it by even the most enthusiastic Germans, although it contains also cold bits inserted by Goethe in his later years. There are pages brimming with that intense poetry where the height of art seems like the easiest simplicity. Who can read, dry-eyed, the last scene ? “ Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben ” is simply untranslatable. But, as Goethe said of Byron, — when he wrote poetry he was sublime, when he began to think he was child, — it may be said of him that when he began to think he was an old man, and the last part of Faust is a work of the intellect, and not of the heart, and lacks the eternal youth which all true poetry has. Indeed, all Goethe’s life was a conflict between his passionate heart and his cool head. His hot love and his cold withdrawings, his intense feelings and his critical analyses, prove this.

Now, of all this Mr. Boyesen makes no account, and doubtless it is well that students should not pick flaws with what receives universal respect. Taine, for instance, or Dr. Johnson, is not the teacher from whom we should care to have our children receive instruction about the Paradise Lost, and it is well that beginners should learn to admire before they are taught to find fault. For this purpose Mr. Boyesen’s book is very good. The student will find bits of information and of critical comment to accompany the text of Faust, and he can hardly fail to receive benefit from this carefully prepared volume. Where the various commentators have parted company and gone hopelessly astray, Mr. Boyesen picks out what seems the true explanation from all kinds of sources, and makes clear what would have been confused. His enthusiasm for his subject is really inspiring, and it is equaled only by his painstaking exactness. Possibly Mr. Boyesen’s fling at the interest felt by the French romantic school for Goethe hardly does justice to the great poet’s sympathy with his admirers, which Eckermann frequently reports. To us this appears to have been much greater than his feeling for Carlyle, hut this is a matter about which opinions may fairly differ.

It is impossible to close without praising the excellence of Mr. Boyesen’s style. He beats most American writers, as he docs many German commentators, on their own ground.

— Mr. Spedding’s Life of Bacon⁷ certainly ranks high as an authority concerning the great man whose works have been the constant study of the biographer. The book is really compact of study, research, and unwearying care, and we can feel pretty sure that Mr. Spedding will leave his name indissolubly connected with that of Bacon. This American edition leaves out considerable matter which may be fairly enough called superfluous, and these excisions have the full approval of Mr. Spedding, so that in its present form the book may be regarded as a careful revision of an already valuable book. That excision was needed cannot be denied ; Mr. Spedding in his desire to be complete had amassed much that the reader would be likely to omit. In this revised reprint the task of selection has been discreetly performed, and consequently the life is much improved. It is really, one might almost say, the official memoir.

At the close of the book, Mr. Spedding says that Bacon’s character can be left to the debating societies for discussion and possible determination, and there is but little doubt that it will be still a question on which two opinions will be obstinately maintained for a long time. Biographers are not unfrequently advocates, and Mr. Spedding, if he errs at all, errs in the direction of putting too favorable construction on the dark parts of Bacon’s life. Macaulay’s bitter denunciation of Bacon is well known, and it is safe to say that much of what he says is left unanswered. In the case of Peacham, for instance, we are told that the incident was only noteworthy because Bacon was present as a witness when he was tortured, and that there is no mention of any interest in the matter on the part of Ids contemporaries. But this is all that even Macaulay claimed; he thought it a lamentable thing that Bacon had been present when a man was tortured, and he expressed his feeling very warmly.

With regard to the infinitely more serious matter of Bacon’s acceptance of bribes, Mr. Spedding shows great tact and judgment. The whole pitiable history is told with great simplicity, and with every scrap of information that could be collected. Throughout, the biographer defends Bacon to the best of his ability, and every palliating circumstance is urged that ingenuity could discover and affection suggest. The decision of the lords had, he says, “ a great constitutional value: it inflicted upon an abuse which had been heretofore tolerated a punishment which made it thereafter infamous.” But even Mr. Spedding, a few pages earlier (vol. ii., page 507), says that he “ should not be surprised to find that the taking of gifts from suitors was one of those practices which, though everybody knew them to be illegal, and nobody would undertake publicly to justify them, were nevertheless not only generally indulged by those who received the profit, but generallyknown of and tolerated by others who had no share in it.” Again, “ Upon this point, however, I have not myself seen any evidence that seems conclusive.” This is the spirit which the reader most cares to find in a biographer, — a disposition to maintain the reputation of the man whose life is written, to defend his faults and call attention to his good qualities. Too judicial severity would seem as out of place as on the lips of a man who describes the shortcomings of his own family with precision. Moreover, we all know that the more we study a man, the more disposed we are to think well of him, — of course, there are exceptions, but the statement is generally true, — and in Bacon’s case harsh judgment seems especially odious. But it is possible to acknowledge the greatness of his errors, and, so to speak, to forgive him, to think only of what was great and fine in his character. We shall have but few books to read if we wait for the histories of only faultless men, and Bacon has left us enough to outweigh many times his faults.

In a word, this memoir shows us what Bacon was; it is full and accurate, and is brought into much more reasonable compass by the tact of the American editor.

— The paper in this volume of L’Art1 which will peculiarly interest Americans is that of M. Charles Tardien on our painting at the Universal Exposition of 1878. It is not a flattering paper, nor is it a satisfactory paper. The ability of M. Tardieu to estimate the American spirit and American conditions may be inferred from his statement that Mr. Bret Harte “paints the actual manners of America.” Poetry, he rightly declares, owes to us in Longfellow one of the greatest artists of the century, and he ends by saying, “American painting may have long to await its Longfellow, but we count upon soon seeing its Bret Harte.” We hope not very soon, M. Tardieu, if his coming is to mean the further misapprehension of American things through the work of genius which, however surprising, is that of a romancer, and not a realist. American painting may be what you will of feeble and insufficient, but so far as truth to American life is concerned, it is much better without its Bret Harte. That it should be more true to our life, that it should be more patriotic (in the æsthetical way), more indigenous, more native, M. Tardieu very justly insists, and he has an acceptable impatience with our artists for living, thinking, and being in other atmospheres than ours, and for so rarely taking their subjects from their own country. Of the sixteen illustrations to the paper, only four are of American subjects, and only two—Mr. Winslow Homer’s Sunday Morning in Virginia, and Mr. Inness’s Medfield landscape — could have been painted nowhere else but in America. The rest are mythological, Bavarian, Egyptian, Breton, and Heaven knows what. M. Tardieu’s tone is patronizing, and a little insolent, as he had the right to make it upon this showing ; and we cannot complain of it when he “ roughs ” Mr. J. McL. Hamilton, who has profited by his voluntary exile to paint the indecent doze of an improper Parisian, with her parrot, and her champagne, and her Journal pour Rire, and her stocking ; as Tardieu suggests, that sort of thing might have been studied in Philadelphia. But where M. Tardieu is clearly wrong is in his treatment of Mr. Vedder,—or rather, L’Art itself is wrong. This journal, as we learn from Mr. Vedder’s protest, especially requested him to furnish designs for engravings from his Cumæan Sibyl and his Young Marsyas, and these are made the occasion by M. Tardieu to reproach him with a “ misdirected classicism,” of which “his education is not thorough enough to enable him to assimilate the tradition,” while his “native originality is not strong enough to renew it,” M, Tardieu goes on out of his way to insinuate that whatever pleasure the illustrations may give is attributable not to the painter, but to the engraver. L’Art had the right to express an unfriendly opinion of Mr. Vedder with any severity, but it had no right to ask him to prepare its text. The whole performance is what we untutored outlaws of the Western World, whose manners Mr. Harte has painted, would call shabby. L’Art has, by way of compensation, an excellent letter on artistic matters in the United States, treating largely of the New York Metropolitan Museum and the Cincinnati Women’s Art Association. It has of course, also, the usual array of articles, agreeably written and wonderfully illustrated, on the artistic interests everywhere. One of these, especially rich, is on Contemporary Ceramics of the Exposition ; another is the second paper on the Grosvenor Gallery; another, in several parts, on the Prado Museum at Madrid; others on Dutch, Swiss, Greek, and Russian art at the Exposition ; another, curiously interesting and extremely valuable for the finely etched portrait, on the Mary Tudor (bloody Mary) of Antonio Moro at Madrid; another on Japanese Art at the Exposition ; another on Belgian Art there, with a delicious etching of Les Visiteuses of Alfred Stevens, and a wood-engraving of his extraordinary Sphinx Parisien, — “angel or demon, girl or wife, one knows not,” but an inscrutable marvel of cunning, audacious, self-sufficing, mysterious vapidity, alluring, repelling, altogether discomforting and discomfiting. A young face, with two fingers of the left hand at the corner of the small mouth, short nose, wide-open eyes, and hair en caniche stares at you from the convolutions of a fur boa; it is, as we said, extraordinary, and the most notable thing in this volume of L’Art.

— Miss Young, in her Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain⁸ has done a man’s work in the modern woman’s fashion. Recent experience of woman’s work in this and in kindred fields of the practice and observation of art has already furnished us with such a high standard of performance that the sex can no longer be sheltered by la politesse from the rigors of criticism. In the republic of letters and art she claims and is held to a man’s responsibility. This especial department she is certainly qualified to occupy with peculiar fitness and grace, and Miss Young’s work on The Ceramic Art goes far to realize the just demand and expectation of the critic.

The main point of originality and interest in this volume resides in the fact that the subject is viewed from an American point of observation; and although we have no right to expect and do not find in the book any new discoveries in the general history of the art, yet the new stand-point seems to offer certain advantages in fresh groupings of familiar facts, and in presenting in the foreground a view, by no means so familiar but in every way interesting and instructive, of our own national achievements and prospects in the art, and their relations to its various developments in other countries. To many readers it will be a surprise that we have, as a people, gained a position in the manufacture of faïence and porcelain worthy to occupy so much space in a general history. Our position, it is true, is one rather of promise than of performance, and our wares cannot of course compete as yet with the higher class of productions from the best workshops of Europe ; but in the better class of common household table service we are already producing work so excellent that a Staffordshire manufacturer, quoted by an English arbitrator at our Exposition, has said : “ The boast of the Americans is no empty boast, that in ten years, at the rate they are going on, they will supersede British crockery in the United States.” Indeed, the statistics show that the importation of Staffordshire ware has almost entirely ceased, the market being fully occupied, according to English testimony, by American goods superior to the corresponding class produced in England, and at a much lower price. (Speech of Mr. McKinley, of Ohio, in the house of representatives, in the debate on the tariff in 1878.) Miss Young is more modest in her expression than this authority, but her vigilance has gathered sufficient evidence to indicate not only that the manufacture of faïence as a commercial commodity is already an important interest in our industrial arts, but that, in the higher grades of faïence and porcelain, such as that produced at the Greenpoint works in New York, at Bennington, Vt., at Trenton, N. J., at Jersey City, and at Chelsea, Mass., the artistic work may sometimes challenge comparison with the corresponding productions of the Old World. Painting over glaze is of course recognized as a common elegant accomplishment, and the more difficult technical work of decorating under glaze is carried on with a promise of success which may in time give characteristic expression to our artistic capacity as a nation. The illustrative wood-cuts'of the American manufactures confirm our own observation that, although the work is full of promise, absolute excellence is phenomenal. Our higher efforts at design in this as in other arts is still distinguished by an absence of reserved power; by a want of that natural elegance which is the result of traditions loyally developed through a long series of experiments ; by a hardihood of invention and an eagerness for originality which, unrestrained by the training of schools, has expression in a certain crudity and baldness, not to say vulgarity, which are the distinguishing marks of all our really vernacular arts. But surely this awkwardness is the awkwardness of undeveloped strength. We can wait.

But Miss Young carries us back from the porcelain of Greenpoint to the prehistoric pottery of the Mississippi mound-builders; from the elegant modern productions of Haviland and Copeland, Limoges and Lambeth, to the vases in the tombs of Curium and the sun-dried bricks of Egypt, The Scheme of her book includes four main divisions, devoted successively to nomenclature and methods of manufacture, and to Oriental, European, and American ceramics. The first division is very full and instructive, and shows, if not a practical familiarity with the complicated processes of mixing and firing in the various wares, at least a very vigorous inquiry on her part among the best authorities in literature and practice. As for the historical parts, our author displays a fruitful industry in her investigations, but she by no means blindly follows even such accepted authorities as Jacquemart or Brougniart; her deductions are frequently original and ingenious, and her narrative is always bright and interesting. Of the four hundred and sixty-four illustrations the greater part is gathered from accessible American collections, and as a general rule, represents the types and not the exceptions of the art.

It is a distinctive merit of Miss Young’s book that the relations of the art to the people who practiced it are set forth with a vigor of research and an independence of judgment which are by no means common in works of this class. When one undertakes this subject who is not skilled in the art of combining facts and rejecting nonessentials, the excessive detail to which he is invited is apt to obliterate the impression of the preceding parts, and to produce a result of confusion. But Miss Young’s book furnishes attractive and remunerative reading even to those whose tastes are not hospitable to pots and crockery, and may well be set down in reading courses as a valuable supplement to general ethnological and even political histories; for she rarely loses sight of the essential points of her subject, and rarely suffers herself to be led astray by technical digressions, which, though perhaps a necessary knowledge to the special student, are a fatigue and stumbling-block to the general reader.

— Six little books⁹ of interest are the Messrs. Harper’s reprints of the first volumes of the series of literary biographies projected by Mr. John Morley, who, besides the lives of Johnson, Gibbon, Scott, ShelIey, Goldsmith, and Hume, has in preparation by various hands the lives of Spenser, Bunyan, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, Swift, Burns, Byron, and De Foe. The names of the biographers are hardly so interesting, though they include those of Messrs. Froude, Huxley, William Black, Thomas Hughes, and Goldwin Smith; but there is warrant in them, and in the manner in which the work already done is done, that a well-conceived enterprise will be well carried out. The volumes published are none of them brilliant, but they are of a good, honest, careful workmanship, such as the present processes of British literary manufacture nearly always turn out. They range in quality from Mr. Stephens’s Johnson to Mr. Symonds’s Shelley. The writers have not gone to original sources ; they have necessarily used the material of former biographers; to the student of literature they bring no news, and they divine little that was not known of character already. But they speak with information, with just observation, and with sense, and they speak agreeably.

Mr. Black, in his pleasant monograph ou Goldsmith, takes generally the ground opposite to that heretofore assumed by the poet’s biographers,—especially, his most voluminous and disagreeable biographer, the late Mr. John Forster. This writer, a mind of coarse fibre and of thumb-fingered perceptions, perpetually beats himself into a passion of pity and indignation for sufferings which were at least as largely attributable to Goldsmith’s unfortunate temperament as to his unfortunate circumstances, and Mr, Black’s attitude is the natural revolt which the general reader makes from Mr. Forster’s tedious commiseration. Indeed, Mr. Forster is himself from time to time wearied by it, and cautions people not to let his excited sympathy impose upon them ; but mostly he promotes the mistake that Goldsmith was an ill-used man. He certainly lived in a time when the trade of letters was at its most unprosperous, but seldom has a man been so much and so often befriended. “ Was poet ever so trusted before?” asks Johnson, referring to the two thousand pounds which Goldsmith died owing ; and he says elsewhere, “ He had raised money and squandered it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense.” That is the truth; and if he was not the less a genius, and not the less a most lovable man, for his waste, he was certainly none the more so for it. He is forever dear to us for the breath of simple and humble love of home which he breathed into English poetry, and he was doubtless better than many a man who did not game, or cheat his tailor, or live loosely ; still, for the great mass of mankind, it is better to be honest and chaste, and it would have been better for Goldsmith to have been so. Mr. Black’s analysis of his character is good and clear without being profound, and his criticism of his literature is apt and clever without being at any time subtile, without giving the last touch of satisfaction. His book is like the other books of this series in being of a slight impressiveness while being very good. So far, they have treated of men so well known otherwise that it is quite impossible to say whether the books alone would make them intelligible. They are pleasant recapitulations, for the most part, of what has been already thought and said.

— In his new Volume ¹⁰ Mr. Piatt has rearranged a good many poems already familiar to his readers, with others of like mood now collected for the first time. They are all poems that treat of the things of home in his characteristic way, and one cannot read them without feeling the charm of a rare and tender spirit, —a sympathy which never dissolves in sentimentality, and a simplicity infinitely removed from commonness. They have to do with interests rather than incidents, with impressions, experiences, regrets, fancies; they are lyrics, not ballads. It is a book to be read by winter fires and under summer trees ; but it will not yield its sweetness to the reader who comes to it impatiently. You must be yourself fond of the gentle and inartificial aspects of life, before you can enjoy it. As we have before expressed, it breathes the perpetual homesickness of a new land ; it is Western in nothing so much as its tinge, of melancholy.

Among the pieces not included in the Poems of House and Home is the fine and stately Ode written for the opening of he Cincinnati Music Hall, which, if here and there a little too closely wrought for public recitation, is all the better for the private perusal of such as can rend twice.

— Mrs. Celia Thaxter’s elegant little volume, modestly self-styled Drift-Weed,¹¹ is really not weedy in the least. It is much more like a collection of shells from one of our Northern beaches, delicate in tint, simple and symmetrical in form, minute and light, exceedingly, and it must be confessed remarkably, like One to another. But a chain of sea-shells is always a pretty thing, and in certain of these one may catch, by intent listening, fragments of the murmur of the great deep.

1Poems of House and Home. By J. TIATT. Boston : Houghton, Osgood & Co. 1879.2Drift-Weed.A Co'lection of Poems. By CELIA THAXTEH Boston Houghton, Osgood &Co. 1879.

— There is to us a peculiarly agreeable flavor in Mr. Winter’s little book about England,¹² — the tone of a fine, gentle, and somewhat pensive mind. Mr. Winter’s reminiscences of England are almost wholly confined to London, where he visits the objects which all tourists visit ; when he goes out of London it is to go to Warwick and Kenilworth, and to Stratford-on-Avon; he has also a glimpse of France. What always breathes from his page is a loyal and manly love of English places, English manners, and English men. He belongs to the tradition of Irving, who took England and its inhabitants both to his heart; whereas most of us are agreed with Hawthorne that England would be very well but for the English people in it. But no one can help sympathizing with Mr. Winter’s mood, nor help listening with interest to whatever he says of the haunts dear to history and biography and romance. His attitude is studiously unambitious and serious ; there are no tiresome attempts at making fun ; the literature of the little book is as sweet and pure as its spirit is sincere. You may be sure that the writer attributes: nothing to himself that he does not feel, and there is such evident honesty in all his opinions that if he likes to call the righteous execution of Charles the First a “ murder,” we, for our part, like to have him do it.

— The edition of Macaulay’s England¹³ which Messrs. Harper and Brothers publish in five volumes hardly affords occasion for comment on a work whose place is so securely fixed, and whose qualities are so well known. But the fit shape and aspect of the edition is to be praised; the volumes are of a handsome octavo; the type is very clear, and the paper is of a singularly agreeable tint and texture; the cloth of the binding is a decent black. The first volume has a forcible engraved portrait of Macaulay after a photograph by Claudit, — the clear, firm face of a man who has produced more good reading of a good kind than perhaps any other of our century, — In four discourses ¹⁴ upon Socialism in General, Communistic, Anti-Communistic, and Christian Socialism, the author sketches some of the changes in social conditions produced by modern civilization, touching upon the employment of machinery, the extension of commerce, the creation of new wants, the transfer of most of the land to a few owners, and the increase of pauperism.

He thinks that the average European peasant was better off, relatively, in the fourteenth century than his successor in our own time; that is, his work would obtain more food then than now. Our civilization, though nominally Christian, is distinctively materialistic. The inequality in the distribution of wealth cannot be wholly justified, but as civilization advances the distance between the upper and lower classes becomes greater, and this inequality of conditions the author regards as permanent and inevitable, as most of its causes are permanent. Philanthropy concerns itself about the whole nature and destiny of man for time and eternity; socialism deals with the environment, and ends with time. It dreams of regenerating society without regenerating the individual, or insists upon beginning with society. This is its failure. The result of communistic socialism would be equality of social conditions enforced and reënforced from generation to generation, and this would lead to anarchy, the destruction of art, religion, morality, and civilization, and the prevalence of unmitigated animalism.

The author’s conclusion is that labor " must for the most part look out for itself.” He does not approve the organization of a labor party in politics, nor of any action on the part of the government for the relief of labor difficulties, except the establishment of a bureau to collect and tabulate statistics. He advises that job work be substituted for time work wherever it can possibly be done; thinks the study of political economy is of great importance to theological students, and that the entire problem of Christian charity needs to be thoroughly overhauled; and believes that we may hope for Christians enough by and by to make the commerce of the world more sane and sober. “ That Christianity will hold its own I do not for a moment doubt. Always it has been the best thing in the world, and always it has conquered the world.”

The discourses are highly rhetorical, and there is much historical and literary allusion, but there is a lack of vigorous reflection. The book may be regarded as a tolerable introduction to the subject of socialism, but the discussion is painfully inadequate. The confidence that our farmers can be trusted, and that no communistic engineering can barricade a prairie, is a queer basis for optimism. This is much as if the Yellow Fever Commission should triumphantly report that New Orleans is not in danger of ruin by volcanic eruptions. What is needed, if there is anything grave in our social conditions, is not a new eulogy of Christianity, but patient and resolute analysis of the phenomena of our civilization, and the suggestion of methods for the application of remedial or improving influences. It is not a time for eloquence, but for thought.

— This volume,¹⁵ which contains an exact account of the grounds and buildings of the Centennial Exhibition, will be of more interest, possibly, a hundred years hence, when our descendants will quote from this list of measurements the petty dimensions of the buildings we thought so grand only three years ago. Meanwhile, a complete description is good, and there is no doubt that the statistics in this volume are accurate. The engravings, however, are not so satisfactory, although they are exact enough. This is a book that will be more sought for by public than by private libraries.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.

It is late in the day to say anything about Cherbuliez’s L'Idée de Jean Têterol,¹⁶ for those who have not read the book in French have done the next best thing and read it in English, and congratulations on the excellence of the novel come in after the feast is long since devoured. It shares with many other of Cherbuliez’s stories the merit of being of his best, and that best is very good, fur there is no novelist with a clearer vision of what he undertakes to describe, and a greater power of representing things clearly, than this author. To speak of his wit is to talk platitudes; his invention is always ingenious, and this time he has given us a novel without any such lapse of taste as mars some of his stories, in which in his effort to be touching he becomes melodramatic, as in his Ladislas Bolski and La Revanclre de Joseph Noirel. Fallible man must fail somewhere, and Cherbuliez delights his readers, but it is by his appeal to their intelligence; he never touches the heart, except possibly in Panle Méré. Fortunately, however, there are different kinds of good novels, and Cherbuliez stands at the head of the writers of his kind.

The plot of this story is as simple as possible ; it is the account of the way in which the man who has become rich tries to revenge himself on his former master. The hero, Jean Têterol, is the self-made man, and the drawing of his peasant nature is admirably done, as it is put into contrast with the most worldly and fascinating lack of character of the thriftless nobleman. The account of the struggle between the two men almost hides the excellence of the part about the two young people, the charming daughter of the nobleman and Têterol’s accomplished, but unpriggish son. In a word, the story is as bright as possible. Cherbuliez is never dull, and here he has excelled himself. His wit is constant; every paragraph, with its epigram at the end, is a model of good writing. Those are to be envied who have yet to read this capital story.

—Louis Ulbach is by no means a writer who deserves to be compared with Cherbuliez, but some of his stories are well worth reading. A recent one of his, Simple Amour ¹⁷ by name, is almost charming. It is the sequel of another novel, but there is not required for the enjoyment of it any more knowledge of its predecessor than is given in a few pages of the present volume. The main merit of the Story is the drawing of a radical, a village tailor by trade, and of his daughter, Marcelline, who are hound by various ties to an aristocratic family of the neighborhood. The heir of this family falls in love with Marcelline, and his youthful passion is well described, as is her conduct. There are various other persons introduced who are not the conventional people of the French novel, and about the whole story there is a pleasing air of novelty, which in too great a quantity might become tedious, although for a change Ulbach is pleasant enough. He has no great power, but there is a kindliness of heart about him, and an intention of doing good by his work, that are rare and attractive qualities. This novel certainly, slight as it is, cannot fail to please those who do not crave the most highly spiced fiction.

— Those who want fiction of the spiced kind have probably read Mario Uchard’s L’Etoile de Jean,¹⁸ as it appeared last year in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Uchard is of course not one of the greatest of living novelists, and perhaps he will he best known to posterity as the husband of Madeleine Brohan, and the man who is supposed to have introduced bits of his autobiography into a play he wrote for the Théâtre Franèais about twenty years ago. Yet this novel is entertaining enough, as novels go. It is as artificial a story as ever was beaten out of a writer’s brains, but it keeps the reader’s attention fastened while he has the book open before him ; it is only when he has finished that he will feel any discontent with the writer’s method, and even then his discontent will not be of a very serious kind. The hero, whose family relations are of an extremely complicated kind, has been a soldier on the Southern side during our war, and he has brought back with him that phlegmatic nature which is the distinguishing trait of all good Yankees. The evil angel of the book is a young woman of gypsy blood from Cincinnati, who has married the eminent General O’Donor. She is known as Lady O’Donor. We have no cause for complaint, however, for there is similar inexactness in the way that noble dame wanders about France in a boy’s dress, without exciting surprise even when she calls upon a respectable family. " The originality of Lady O’Donor was a satisfactory explanation of a visit to Brittany in this disguise.” In fact, the scene of the novel is set in the civilized fairy-land which is familiar to the readers of French stories. The principal interest of the story hangs upon the escape of a young girl from her mother, who is anxious to make her marry a man against her will. By a singular coincidence, Henry Gréville’s Marier sa Fille has just the same plot.

— Now that this last-named author has settled down to the regular composition of three— or is it tour? —novels a year, it is impossible to notice every one of her books, which, moreover, appear in English about as soon as they do in French. Certainly Marier sa Fille ¹⁹ is an entertaining story. The heroine and the hero stand out in bold relief against the setting of their disreputable surroundings, and there is a great deal of humor in the talk of all the people. In short, the writer’s cleverness cannot he questioned, and there will be but few, it is fair to say, who will object to the goodnatured way in which the good people are rewarded for their virtue by a comfortable income, although the generous gift on the part of the author is like the way in which amiable hostesses cram the pockets of their neighbors’ children with sweetmeats when they leave the house. The question of its fitness for translation does nor fairly come up here, but it may be well to wonder whether the array of vicious relations and habits that makes the merit of the story is exactly what careful parents would like to place in the hands of young girls. So long as a book stays in the original French, it is, so to speak, behind a door,—in the bookcase, possibly, but yet not under the hand; when it is translated, it tempts the youngest readers, who will not be much improved by premature knowledge of vicious society. Other readers, however, will find the book agreeable.

— The four books just discussed bear the mark of being manufactured to suit the public rather than that of being the utterances of writers who were burdened with something to say, and it is a pleasure to turn to a volume of such real merit as Paul Heyse’s last volume of collected stories, entitled Das Ding an sich.²⁰ When it is mentioned that this is the twelfth volume of Heyse’s short stories, it will be seen how practiced a writer he is. He has done well, too, to confine himself so exclusively to short stories. He has twice tried to write long novels, and the Kinder der Welt and Im Paradise serve to show what a fist he made of it. It is hard to say which of the two is the poorer. Im Paradise has been translated, and has received the flattery that is more the due of the German empire and of the German army than of the distasteful and long-winded novel itself. In his short stories, however, Heyse fully deserves all the praise that he has got, and more. Of the four that form this volume there is not one that is poor. They should not be translated, because here, as in other instances, Heyse has chosen subjects which stand outside of our conventional propriety. Yet he writes with such delicacy of feeling, with such true modesty, that he cannot seriously pain the grown-up reader. Possibly the best of the four is the one called Zwei Gefangene. This tells with great simplicity the story of a young man and a young woman who meet at the theatre, where is given a representation of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. They fall into conversation, and it appears that the youth of both has been Sacrificed to the claims of duty. Then arises in both—and it is very naturally told— the longing for a taste of the joys of life, and, to put it grossly into a single sentence, they run off together. He is a priest, that is to say, he is a sort of innocent Fra Filippo Lippi, who has come into some money, and they propose coming to this country to be married. On their way he meets at Hamburg a woman who makes him untrue, and the tale ends tragically. This, it will be seen, is not a plot that Miss Mulock, for instance, would have chosen, but no one can read the story without seeing the hand of a master in the way it is told. There is another story, equally sad, of a young officer who falls in love with a young girl; and the one that gives the title to the book, though possibly a trifle Spun out, shows us, what indeed is nothing new, how worthy a writer Paul Heyse is. He has many of the qualities of a great novelist, and if he is better at writing tales than at writing long novels, he is not to be despised on that account, any more than is Meissonier, for choosing small canvases.

Heyse has very delicate feeling, and he writes in a really charming style, which is what few German authors do. This volume cannot fail to be read with pleasure by those who like good work. Good storywriters are rare even nowadays, when every one tries his or her hand at some form of novel.