Comment on New Books

HOLIDAY BOOKS.

Mr. Bradford Torrey has recently drawn fresh attention to the delights which lie in wait for the reader of Thoreau, and has hinted at the new edition of the Cape Cod (Houghton) just put forth with delicate artistic marginal notes in color. The grace of these designs and the beauty of execution in the very difficult art of color-printing meet the eye at once ; a closer inspection reveals a rare felicity in the manner in which Miss Watson, the artist, has complemented Thoreau. He sometimes gives hints which she expands; she, on the other hand, sometimes contracts his narrative or description into a suggestive reminder. It is seldom, indeed, that illustration is made so to enhance the value of the text. — The device which Mr. Clifton Johnson employs in illustrating books is a little novel, but its virtue lies, not in its novelty, but in the good judgment, taste, and choice of subjects with which he applies it. His practice is to photograph scenes with figures in them which have directly to do with the subject illustrated, and then, by a dexterous use of the brush or pencil, to give the needed touch which makes in effect a picture, and not a photograph. Thus he has taken a number of papers by John Burroughs and grouped them in a volume entitled A Year in the Fields (Houghton), supplying them with twenty illustrations. The result is a very agreeable reproduction of the vicinage of Mr. Burroughs’s home, with Mr. Burroughs himself presented to the eye in unstudied positions. The scenes range through the year and have great variety ; the mechanical process by which the pictures are reproduced is clean and sharp. — Mr. Johnson has applied the same plan to Mr. Barrie’s A Window in Thrums (Dodd, Mead & Co.); only in this instance he has had to deal with fiction. But Thrums so readily finds a prototype in a locality in Scotland, and Mr. Barrie’s portraitures and scenes are so true to life, that one does not greatly complain, and the product is an attractively illustrated volume. There is thus but a thin veil between photography and art ; still there is a veil. — The Surrey edition of Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall (Putnams) is a two-volume decorated and illustrated work. The borders, printed in green, have a variety of devices and mottoes; there are initial letters and tailpieces, and twenty-eight full-page photogravures from designs by Reinhart, Schmolze, Hyde, Sandham, and others. Attention has been paid to the costume of the time of the sketches ; the sketches themselves show Irving at his mellow best, and though we think the decorations and some of the illustrations are hardly in harmony with the spirit of Irving, they will be thanked if they cause the book to find new readers.— Though the value of the work is not made to depend on its illustrations, the generous treatment which Miss Mary E. Perkins has given to her Old Houses of the Antient Town of Norwich, 1600-1800 (The Author), makes it proper to include the book in this section, yet it might quite as properly be placed with books of history. The town of Norwich in Connecticut is preeminent among New England towns for the persistence of a type. Here are spacious houses, but no air of decayed gentility hangs about them. Life has gone on vigorously, and new energies are constantly disclosed. This volume, therefore, has much more than an antiquarian interest ; it is not a museum of New England antiquities, but a vivid picture of a strong life which still flows on. The views of houses, the plans, the portraits combined with the human narrative, make this, the first of a series, incomparably the best monument to New England town life which has ever been produced. — One commonplace but satisfactory pleasure to be derived from the pretty mediævalism of the holiday edition of Mr. Aldrich’s Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book (Houghton) is the ease with which it is read. We have a missal-like setting of the poem, but the fancy is restricted to the form, the cover, the borders, and the rubricating ; the poem itself is not in German text, but in good clear Roman type, so that when one has handled the book he is tempted to begin to read, and he does not resist the temptation. The final impression made on him is of the poem, not of the setting. — Rome of To-Day and Yesterday, the Pagan City, by John Dennie. (Putnams.) Mr. Dennie essays to read the palimpsest of Rome by disclosing the records to be found there of her eleven Pagan centuries. The especial occasion of the reissue of the work is to be found in the five maps and plans and the fifty-eight illustrations from Roman photographs. The half-tone reproductions show how much gain there has been in recent years in this style of picture. — The publisher, Mr. Thomas B. Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has been adding to his collection of books as toys. The little box with a lid does not contain caramels, but The Pageant of Summer, by Richard Jefferies ; The Child in the House, by Walter Pater ; and The Story of Amis and Amile, by William Morris, — each carefully enveloped in postage-stamp paper and tucked away in a little case. This confectionery style seems to intimate that the literature inclosed is too good for human nature’s daily food, but after one has got rid of the boxes and the wrappers he finds books which are the outward signs of inward grace. — The Same house sends in its Bibelot Series Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere and McCarthy’s English prose version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, — a translation which enhances the value of Fitzgerald’s verse by showing how indebted the Persian is to the Englishman. Once more we have four books in a box, belonging to the Old World Series, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, by Andrew Lang, Rossetti’s translation of the Vita Nuova being among them. These long and narrow books defy bookshelves. They spend their lives lying down. — It is an archaic manner which Mr. George Wharton Edwards uses in A Book of Old English Ballads (Macmillan), which he has furnished with pen-and-ink drawings, but the excellent introduction by H. W. Mabie, pointing out the objectivity and directness of the ballad, might have given Mr. Edwards his cue. His few lines might have been even fewer, and his designs would still have been vigorous. — Captive Memories, Commemorative Verses interwoven with California Flowers for Anniversary Days and Presentation Occasions, by James Terry White. (James T. White & Co., New York.) It is somewhat difficult to make a souvenir which shall suit all moods and many occasions, but Mr. White seems to have attempted such a result. The verses are apparently his own, the illustrative flower borders are by various hands, and some ingenious craftsman has succeeded in transferring an aromatic odor to the leaves of the book. In the presence of this last mystery every other device to make the volume something to help remembrance becomes less distinct. One wonders how the scent got in, and then still more if it ever will get out. — William Winter’s Gray Days and Gold (Macmillan) has been issued in a profusely illustrated edition, a style of publication to which the work, of course, readily lends itself. We are glad to learn from the preface of the success of the book in its original form, and also to note the revisions and additions made here, which add to its value as a traveling companion or a reminder of travels past. — The stories of Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia, which have in turn appeared in holiday editions, are now reunited in an exceedingly handsome volume, retaining, we think, all the original illustrations, the work of Smedley, Clinedinst, Reinhart, Frost, Pyle, and Castaigne. (Scribners.) — A Literary Courtship and A Venetian June, by Anna Fuller, have been received with sufficient popular favor to justify their promotion to the rank of gift books. They now appear in two attractive little volumes, with whiteand-gold covers and a number of additional illustrations. (Putnams.)

LITERARY HISTORY.

The blending of personal reminiscence with characterization, appreciation, and criticism, which belongs to Mrs. Fields’s Authors and Friends (Houghton), produces an effect so harmonious, so full of mellow charm, that the reader leaves the book with the feeling that he has been present at Landor’s prophetic feast without having to wait Landor’s deferred pleasure. The company is choice, — Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, Celia Thaxter, Whittier, Tennyson and Lady Tennyson, and, we may justly add, Mrs. Fields herself, — and what is more, the company is at its best without any effort. Mrs. Fields avails herself of letters and private journals, but her own definite recollections, and her happy faculty for seizing upon the really characteristic points of the persons she celebrates, give special value to this admirable piece of literary history. The title of Mrs. Fields’s book suggests very happily the aspect in which men of letters are apt to be regarded by the reading public, even when they are not known in the flesh, and reminds us that better knowledge will often correct impressions made by literary traditions. — Mr. Andrew Lang has taken up rather late the task of giving the world the real John Gibson Lockhart in a handsome two-volume Life and Letters of that enigmatic personage. (Imported by Scribners.) We say “enigmatic,” for Lockhart remains somewhat of a puzzle still, though Mr. Lang has thrown much light on the contradictions of his character. It ought to be enough for the reader, as against the bitter assaults upon Lockhart, that Scott early admired him and steadily confided in him ; but this first comprehensive memoir will make the reader admire him and confide in him on direct evidence, though one might still stand in a little fear of the rapier which Lockhart carried so carelessly. The incidental pictures of the Scott circle, and the graphic touches by which the literary society of the day is set off, add to the value of the memoir, and through much of the narrative runs that undercurrent of domestic sorrow which lifts Hugh Littlejohn into pathetic prominence.

— A much more cheerful but less important retrospect is furnished by Mrs. Mary Cowden - Clarke in her autobiographic sketch entitled My Long Life (Dodd, Mead & Co.), which without break, except for paragraphs, flows on in a smooth, rippling stream for two hundred and seventy pages. There are some great and many interesting names in literature and music which meet the eye as it follows the course of the narrative ; yet the value of the retrospect is not in any light it throws on these men and women, other than the glancing light of allusion, but in the picture it draws of a simple English middle-class society, finding its pleasure in music and modest service in letters. One is permitted to look in on domestic scenes which are tranquil and sunny, and the idyl of Charles and Mary Cowden-Clarke is one which unobtrusively makes a place for itself in the minor history of English literature. — Little Journeys to the Homes of American Authors. (Putnams.) Homes of American Authors was a familiar new book forty years ago. It is now republished under a title which joins it with Mr. Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great, which appeared no longer ago than 1895. This older book has a biographical value of no mean order, and a literary value which is entirely distinctive. If there were older writers now, like Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, and Bancroft, and if the cleverest younger men should go to visit them, and give us their impressions not only of the visit, but of the author’s work, we should have a modern counterpart of this volume. But where is the young Curtis for us to send to the older Emerson? Here is a suggestion for literary clubs : what older men to-day should form the subjects for such a series of papers, and what younger men should write them ? — A pair of old-fashioned books, with modern photogravures, attempt a task somewhat of this sort. Literary Shrines, the Haunts of some Famous American Authors, and A Literary Pilgrimage among the Haunts of Famous British Authors, by Theodore F. Wolfe (Lippincott), afford an opportunity for the reader to acquaint himself, in an easy, rambling fashion, with the externals of literary life. The books are like a series of snap-shots, serviceable as reminiscences to one who has seen the places, but not very vivifying to those who have not.

EDUCATION.

It is easy to pass from literary studies of literature to those books which have a more distinct didactic purpose ; for nothing is more significant of the new ideals of education which have arisen during the last two decades than the enormous growth of interest in our mother tongue, both for itself, as language, and as it embodies itself in literature. Ours is almost if not quite the first generation consciously to feel this interest as a widespread educational force, and to bend its energies to the task of ministering to the popular demand for initiation into the inner mysteries of the writer’s craft. How various are the activities now at work to popularize the study of language and of letters is shown rather curiously by the range of works which accumulate upon the reviewer’s desk in a single fortnight. Dr. Rolfe’s Shakespeare the Boy (Harpers) and a new edition of Charles Cowden-Clarke’s Riches of Chaucer (Macmillan) are the most avowedly popular in intention. Dr. Rolfe has skillfully woven the two or three biographical facts at his disposal into an account of the village life of Warwickshire as it may have appeared to a schoolboy in Shakespeare’s day. The Riches of Chaucer, first published nearly thirty years ago, has naturally an old-fashioned savor. A reader of today, no matter how little strenuous may be his scholarly ideals, will be smitten with some distrust by the statement on the titlepage that “ Chaucer’s impurities have been expunged and his spelling modernized.” Chaucer’s language, as it exists in the best edited modern texts, is so easy of mastery that the wisdom of docking words of their historical endings (to instance only a single, change) in order to make them conform more nearly to present usage may well be questioned, even where the audience addressed is an unacademic one. — Quite at the other pole of popularizing endeavor come such substantial contributions to the library of the serious student as Professor O.F. Emerson’s Brief History of the English Language (Macmillan), a working over and condensation of the same author’s larger history ; and Professor Saintsbury’s History of Nineteenth Century Literature (Macmillan), the fourth and concluding volume in a series which has combined with unusual success the attractiveness of a discursive narrative with the logical development of an historical treatise. Of a like seriousness, but more ambitiously novel in design, is Mr. Greenough White’s Outline of the Philosophy of English Literature (Ginn), the First Part of which, comprised in the present volume, deals with the literature of the Middle Ages. The work is broadly conceived, and is free from the vagarious theorizing which has vitiated many similar attempts, from Taine’s down : on the other hand, there is an over-insistence upon detail and a multiplication of instances which occasionally make it impossible to see the forest for the trees. — Equally philosophical in purpose, but of a more intimate and genial manner of regard, is Professor W. H. Hudson’s Studies in Interpretation (Putnams), three essays on Keats, Clough, and Arnold respectively, which lift themselves out of the flood of current criticism by reason of their dignity of tone, their firmness of structure, and their quiet grasp of essentials. — A pleasant sideproduct, again, of this literary propagandism appears in the shape of Mr. Laurence Hutton’s Literary Landmarks of Venice (Harpers), which gives a local habitation to the vague ghosts of great visitors which form so continual an obsession as one wanders through the Canal Grande and the Giudecea. — The study of composition and the higher rhetoric, which in the last five or ten years has taken so novel a place in the curricula of American colleges, and which represents our distinctive contribution to the new enthusiasm for English study, finds an example in Mr. Arlo Bates’s Talks on Writing English (Houghton), and Mr. William T. Brewster’s Studies in Structure and Style (Macmillan). The first of these books, originally written as a series of lectures for the Lowell Institute, is a valuable aid to the study of composition in its higher phases, and forms a needed continuation of the subject as presented in Professor Wendell’s book. It has the felicitous distinction of teaching without laying emphasis on the didactic. It is a question whether the sort of structural analysis attempted in the Studies of Mr. Brewster can be made profitable without the illuminating touch of personal teaching ; certainly, the critical apparatus has in the main a somewhat dry and forbidding look. The book is interesting, however, as exhibiting very saliently the effort to approach the study of writing from the side of practical technique, which lies at the very source of the new movement. — Nine more of the Old South Leaflets have been published (Directors of the Old South Work, Boston), and they give original documents of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, all of course in the English tongue. In the hands of bright young people under good guidance they ought to stimulate historic interest ; yet without underestimating the value of these tracts in grammar - school teaching, we should be sorry to see them misleading teachers or taught into impatience over the persistently plodding work demanded by a good school history. We do not want self-sufficient young students of history.

FICTION.

The prevailing taste for historical fiction appears to be waxing rather than waning.

Noticeable among recent promising ventures in this field are two tales by S. R. Keightley : The Crimson Sign, a Narrative of the Adventures of Mr. Gervase Orme, Sometime Lieutenant in Mountjoy’s Regiment of Foot ; and The Cavaliers. (Harpers.) Mr. Keightley is not as yet a rival to cause serious concern to Mr. Weyman or Dr. Conan Doyle, but he can construct an interesting story and tell it with spirit, while he is not without knowledge of the times whereof he writes, wherein he differs from at least one recent aspirant who has had a measure of popular success. The Crimson Sign is a tale of the ever memorable defense of Londonderry, and of course the brave Gervase is one of the prime agents in bringing help to the suffering city. The subject of The Cavaliers, as well as the writer’s point of view, is denoted by its title. The hero almost saves King Charles, and early in the narrative unknowingly saves Cromwell from imminent peril, and in the end is saved by him. — Another, and lessor, story of the Civil War is Amyas Egerton, Cavalier, by Maurice H. Hervey. (Harpers.) Amyas also saves the king, as nearly as historic truth will permit, and incidentally beards Cromwell in his own camp. One knows beforehand the presentment of Oliver that will be found in tales that tell of the struggles of gracious and gallant young gentlemen against crop-headed, canting knaves. Mr. Keightley makes praiseworthy if somewhat futile attempts to rise above this convention, but Mr. Hervey’s sketch is of the usual kind, and his narrative will in no way wound the susceptibilities of the devoutest of latter - day Jacobites. — A First Fleet Family, a Hitherto Unpublished Narrative of Certain Remarkable Adventures, compiled from the Papers of Sergeant William Dew of the Marines, by Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery. (Macmillan.) Much of this is practically genuine history, and the fiction mingled with it is so well done, and with so excellent a reproduction of the eighteenth-century manner and modes of thought, that the narrative as a whole admirably depicts the beginnings of New South Wales, the felons who were its first colonists and the men who governed them. It is a pity that the realism of the tale should have been weakened at its close by the story-book marriages of the heroine and the Sergeant. — A quite different study of certain episodes of eighteenth-century history is Two Queens, Caroline Matilda of Denmark and Marie Antoinette of France, a Historical Novel, from the Memoirs of Baron Simolin, with a Preface by F. Max Müller. (Sonnenschein, London ; Macmillan, New York.) Baron Simolin rendered important services to two hapless queens, and his son, altering his first intention of publishing the diaries and letters left by his father, had this material used in constructing a sort of biographical novel. As the interest of the book depends upon the facts it contains, and not at all upon the thread of conventional fiction which holds them together, it is a pity that M. Simolin’s experiences could not have been published in a monograph rather than in a novel. — Mr. Percy Andreae’s The Vanished Emperor (Rand, McNally A Co.) is a contemporary tale, the characters being slightly disguised as tbe Emperor Willibald, Prince Ottomarck, the Duke of Cumbermere, and so on, but quite as much liberty is taken with facts as though it were a romance of some remote period. The story is rather of the detective order, and the complexities of its plot are not always so skillfully treated as might be desired by a careless reader. It cannot be said that the writer shows any greater knowledge of the personages with whom he deals than that likely to be possessed by any one who intelligently observes the events of the time and the actors therein. — A more imposing volume than any of the foregoing, and of more serious purpose, is Gathering Clouds, a Tale of the Days of St. Chrysostom, by Frederic W. Farrar, D. D. (Longmans.) The work is in effect a popular history of St. Chrysostom, with certain illustrative fictitious accompaniments, — the fiction, which is of a somewhat artless sort, being always subordinate to the history. The book may be said to be a companion volume to Darkness and Dawn, in which was shown the triumph of the Church over the world, while Gathering Clouds records the partial triumph of the world over the Church. Like its predecessor, the later tale will suit the taste of a rather numerous class of readers, who can hardly fail to gain from it some vivid impressions of the rule in State and Church in the Constantinople of the fourth century. The author’s rhetorical fervor and the personal feeling that colors his narrative give a certain graphic force to his descriptions of the gorgeousness and corruption of the Eastern empire, and of the almost hopeless warfare waged by the Patriarch John against the powers of evil. — The latest — if she is the latest — Scottish story-teller, Jane Helen Findlater, in The Green Graves of Balgowrie (Dodd, Mead & Co.), shows not only originality and insight, but an excellence of workmanship rather unusual in a first novel. As her people are eighteenth-century gentlefolk, the readers, if the Scottish revival has left any such, who are daunted by the North British Doric will have nothing to fear here. It is the history of two young girls brought up in utter seclusion by a cold-hearted, theorizing mother, whose eccentricity gradually becomes downright insanity, and of the kindly but most unclerical minister of the parish, who educates and befriends the hapless pair. It is a very sad tale, but a profoundly interesting one, and the sisters are sketched with rare delicacy and truthfulness, the recital of their pitiful tragedy being never weakened by sentimentality. — Barncraig is not so well known as Thrums or Drumtochty, but those who have agreeable memories of Gabriel Setoun’s earlier chronicles of that Fifeshire seaport will welcome the further glimpses of its life given in Sunshine and Haar. (Harpers.) That that life has been carefully and sympathetically studied they will not doubt, and the writer’s naturalness and simplicity of treatment, and genuine but unexaggerated sentiment, will be found to give a peculiar charm to some of his sketches. — Redburn, by Henry Ochiltree (Dodd, Mead & Co.), depicts the homely life of the bonnet-lairds of two generations ago with some force and many happy descriptive touches, but with little of that humorous perception characteristic of the best, and of some not the best, of his coworkers. Fortunately, as he avers, the term has no terrors for him, for we fear that the — doubtless jealous—English critics will class this book with kailyard fiction, the more so as the author uses dialect a little unmercifully. That it is a far cry from the Lowlands to Iona is felt in turning to the recent volumes from that most Celtic of writers, Fiona Macleod : The Sin-Eater, and Other Tales ; and The Washer of the Ford, and Other Legendary Moralities. (Patrick Geddes & Colleagues, Edinburgh ; Stone & Kimball, Chicago.) The former book depicts with much imaginative power the gloom, the fatalism, of the Scottish Celt ; the brighter aspects of his nature which the author has dwelt upon elsewhere are untouched here. But we think Miss Macleod’s best work as yet will be found in The Washer of the Ford, of which the spirit is purely poetic. These legends are sometimes pagan, sometimes Christian, and often a mixture of both. The one which will probably be singled out by most readers is Muime Chriosd (the Foster-Mother of Christ), the story of St. Bride (Brighid or Bridget), the Mary of the Gael. This legend, in which the Isles and their inhabitants become Judea and its people, after the fashion of primitive folk-lore, is told with wellnigh perfect art, scarcely marred by any intrusion of latter-day sophistication of thought or feeling.—Susannah, by Mary E. Mann. (Harpers.) The young lady who for one cause or another masquerades as a servant is not unknown to novel-readers ; but she generally has light labor in a family of more or less exalted condition, and we do not remember to have met her before as a slavey in a third-rate lodging-house, though this is what the brave Susannah undertakes, so that she may succor a very weak brother. From the time the girl, just reduced from affluence to poverty, is introduced to us till we leave her on the eve of a happy marriage she holds our interest, and we try to read her history at a single sitting, in spite of its length. The book has plenty of faults, mainly those, it would seem, of inexperience; but it also shows some originality and humor, and a certain skill in character-drawing, even if the latter is marred by exaggeration. — Those who remember The Adventures of Captain Horn, and all who read the book will remember it, have reason to thank Mr. Frank Stockton that he has not left them in suspense regarding the disposition of so much of the great treasure as fell to the share of Mrs. Cliff and of the Peruvian government. Any one, we might say, could find boundless treasure ; very few would know how to spend it; and Mr. Stockton has shown greater skill in his treatment of the handling of her property by a plain New England countrywoman in the face of her neighbors than he did in his narrative of the first finding of the wealth. Mrs. Cliff’s Yacht (Scribners) is the title of this sequel, and the wit and insight into human nature which the first part of the book shows make a happy complement to the stirring adventure which occupies the last part, when the fate of the Peruvian treasure is narrated. — Mr. Henry James is commonly reported to have met with poor success in writing for the stage. It would be easy to point out the defects of his virtues which stand in the way of actors, but no one can read attentively his story of The Other House (Macmillan) and not recognize the power which he possesses of developing a great tragic character. She would be a very great actress indeed who should develop the nature of Rose Armiger in this tale ; for Mr. James has impressed upon the reader, with subtle yet unmistakable power, the personality of this repressing yet volcanic soul. It would be hard to name a book in which the story is so under the breath as this ; the air is charged with electricity up to the very last, and then the storm bursts with a terrific momentary energy. There is a masterly word in one critical sentence which the penetrating reader goes back to with admiration at its story - telling power: “‘God forgive me ! ’ howled Tony.” — With this novel we have a group of those briefer tales which have come, to many readers, to represent Mr. James, and to lead them to class him among the “decadents.” It is the fashion nowadays to call this, that, and the other person decadent, and Mr. James has given plenty of provocation in recent years for the application of the term to him. Certainly, if a super-subtlety of theme, for which no form of expression can be too carefully wrought, constitutes decadence, the four stories well named as a whole Embarrassments (Macmillan) place Mr. James inextricably in the decadent ranks. One finds, for example, the tale of persons who would have given their quivering lives to know “ the general intention ” of a novelist who was caviare to the general. Again, there is the writer who strives with his might and main to write less well in order to be more popular, and succeeds only in giving an acuter pleasure to the few. Glasses, which will not have been forgotten by readers of The Atlantic, is something less intricate in its conception, though one cannot think of its having come from any mind and hand but those of Mr. James. The impression it makes is the most definitely powerful in the present volume ; yet recognizing in the “ literary ” heroes of two of the stories it contains a spirit very like that of Mr. James himself, one could not refrain if one would from a genuine enthusiasm for the means by which the living writer works out the very problems with which the men of his creation are concerned. Not one of them could have brought more skill to bear upon the difficult narrative of The Way it Came than Mr. James has displayed in telling it. — Fables, by Robert Louis Stevenson. (Scribners.) It appears that Stevenson meant one day to publish a book of fables, but Mr. Colvin, who took upon himself the responsibility of printing these, will not vouch for it that the little book which contains them is precisely what Stevenson would have made it before publication. His fame needed no aid from such a source, and, truth to tell, does not gain greatly from it ; for the collection as it stands displays an inequality of merit which one cannot believe Stevenson’s mature hand would have permitted. Nevertheless, one need not be a Steveusoniau to rejoice in the beauty that marks the best of these tales, of which we conceive The Touchstone to be one. The Stevensonian himself will find something of the writer on nearly every page, and any lover of Treasure Island may be thankful for The Persons of the Tale, in which John Silver and Captain Smollett smoke a pipe together after the thirty-second chapter of the book, and discuss the story-teller and his purpose. — A Puritan in Bohemia, by Margaret Sherwood. (Macmillan.) Miss Sherwood displayed her clever faculty for giving a taste of life in An Experiment in Altruism. She has attempted a similar form of fragmentary, lightly connected scenes and dialogues to set forth a very simple story, and she has succeeded better, for she has reduced the number of her figures, and has kept more distinctly before her mind the problem of her chief character. So far as the book is criticism of life and art it is clever rather than superficial, but suggests depths of feeling and belief for the reader to sound rather than opens them to view. That is, her characters when on show do not wholly deliver themselves to the reader, but Miss Sherwood beckons him into a corner and tells him a little more. Both books have the graces and defects of amateurish work, but they give one a lively hope of favors to come.

FUN.

A Second Century of Charades, by William Bellamy. (Houghton.) Mr. Bellamy might have said, but he did not: —

At any rate, the present guesser seems to have stumbled on a few comparatively easy riddles upon opening the book. One has this distinct pleasure, that Mr. Bellamy always plays fair, even when he sets his trap most delicately. — Daphne, or The Pipes of Arcadia. Three Acts of Singing Nonsense. By Marguerite Merington. (The Century Co.) A witty libretto for an opera. Gilbert’s work is plainly Miss Merington’s model, and she has been very clever in her scenes and dialogue ; but as with Gilbert, the dramatic faculty is lacking and the plot comes to nothing. One reads it with a hearty wish that he might see the thing on the stage and hear it, when he would not have to apply literary canons too strictly. — The Golliwoggs’ Bicycle Club. Pictures by Florence K. Upton ; Words by Bertha Upton. (Longmans.) An extravaganza in pictures, where the figures are jointed dolls making a tour to various countries. The verse is also purposely wooden. —The evolution of Woman, by Harry Whitney Mc Vickar. (Harpers.) A series of satirically humorous pictures in color, designed to set forth woman in all ages, with an implied contrast between the early subjection of woman and the late topsy-turviness. The parody of historical situations is often clever ; but are not our funny papers funny enough ? Do we need to perpetuate this fun in books ?

STANDARD LITERATURE.

Since we last made mention of the Temple Shakespeare, five of the miniature volumes have appeared, the one closing the series being the Sonnets (Macmillan), which has a frontispiece from a design by Watts. This volume is the prettiest of all, for it has not the ugly head-lines used in the others ; though why the editor should think it necessary to number the lines of fourteen-line poems is past finding out. The series, as we have repeatedly said, is judiciously and frugally edited, gracefully illustrated, neatly bound, and very handy for use. — The expiration of the copyright of a considerable number of Robert Browning’s poems in England has led the English publishers to bring out a compact edition in two volumes, and the work is issued from the same sheets in America by the Macmillan Company. Mr. Birrell’s name is given as editor, but the editorial work is unimportant, for Mr. Birrell contents himself with the briefest possible and sometimes superfluous statements regarding the writings ; a synopsis even of such a poem as Pippa Passes concluding, “ It is a play of much simplicity as well as rare charm.” In short, the satisfaction of getting Browning’s Poems in a new edition in two easily read volumes is not enhanced by any of the special qualities of Mr. Birrell’s work. A good journeyman littérateur could have done as much.—Mr. Birrell is himself, delightful, incisive, saucy, and generous in the introduction which he supplies to the graceful edition in six small volumes of Boswell’s Johnson. (Macmillan.) He refrains wisely from much annotation. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has done the thing once for all, but Mr. Birrell’s introduction may profitably be read two or three times in place of as many pages of notes to be read once. The edition is a reissue in the main of Malone’s. It is handy, has good etched frontispieces, and we hope its beauty and cheapness will bring it into the possession of that enormous number of persons who, in Mr. Birrell’s words, “are capable of enjoying it to the tips of their fingers.”— The Macmillans have added to their admirable edition of Standard Novels The King’s Own, by Captain Marryat, illustrated by E. H. Townsend, and excellently introduced by David Hannay, who frankly concedes that this ’prentice work is rather remarkably faulty in construction, and in certain important cases conventional, not to say vague, in characterization. Yet, allowing all this, the story at times shows its author almost at his best, and gives promise of the greater things which are to come. — The series of Thomas Hardy’s novels is enriched by Under the Greenwood Tree. (Harpers.) How gladly one names over these earlier stories!

ESSAYS AND POEMS.

Mrs. Whitney has through her many books so long given generous counsel that when at last she makes deliberately Friendly Letters to Girl Friends (Houghton) one is struck with the fact that all her books of fiction are genuine expressions of a most friendly nature. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, and we do not wonder that Mrs. Whitney, having so long used imaginary tones, is willing now to speak in her natural voice; and these wise, sympathetic words, reminiscential in a degree, about books, society, marriage, work, religion, are at once direct and suggestive, charged with a noble philosophy of life and mellow with a ripe experience. — The Listener is the title of a group of miniature essays by J. E. Chamberlin (Copeland & Day), devoted to airy somethings. The essays are grouped in two tidy volumes, one gathering those In the Country, the other In the Town. The touch is graceful and humorous : it is more than this,—it is distinctly humane ; for whether in town or in country, Mr. Chamberlin hears in an acute fashion the voice of men, women, and children ; sometimes the sound is but a distant murmur, sometimes it is a very distinct note, but always it means an insistent life ; and though apparently these small tomes only skim the surface of things, they are really marked by genuine insight and sympathy. They afford agreeable reading for chinks of time. — Songs of Exile, by Herbert Bates. (Copeland & Day.) As the poet in Celia Thaxter was recognized through her Landlocked, so it must have been a poet who wrote the verses Home, in this small volume. In them Mr. Bates expresses with marked vividness and beauty a spirit which animates many of his pages,— a spirit of intense longing for the sea in one whose days of exile are passed on the prairies. In his Charter-Day Poem for the University of Nebraska, he recognizes, to be sure, the fact that the scent and sound of the Atlantic are not indispensable elements of life, and produces a poem of higher value than occasional verses often possess. Small as the b4ook — one of the Oaten Stop Series — is, it is long enough to reveal inequalities in the writer’s work ; but there are enough verses of positive and distinctive merit to mark him as a singer of promising voice.