ripe in color, nervous in movement, which lead to the crises of the story, might scarcely be suggested in any synopsis. Some of these incidents, like Bar-Asha's fight with the lions, display the liveliest descriptive power. It may go without saying that a meeting between the son of the widow of Nain and the daughter of Jairus, both of whom the Master had raised from the dead, is full of romantic charm, and the love-story thus introduced is a golden thread in the luminous tapestry. The tragedy of Messias' death is treated with fine impressiveness. That remark able group which gathered about the Man of Nazareth is drawn in a manner to illustrate the curiously complicated emotions and impulses inspired by the words and person of the Jewish preacher.

Mr. Brooks has here written his strongest book, and gives us one of the stateliest and most vigorous romances yet inspired by any similar theme. (Putnam. $1.25.)-Brooklyn Times.

LANG'S "OLD FRIENDS."

It is a foregone conclusion that people who delight in the exploits of literary dalliance of the finer sort will welcome an "" experiment" by Andrew Lang. In his recent volume," Old Friends," he is like a Japanese conjurer we saw recently, who set a tossing in the air above his head one bright-hued ball after another, and kept them all in motion without clashing, and apparently without an effort, save that of the will. Mr. Lang's quaint conceit of bringing together in a series of confidential letters the immortal characters of fiction, who, to some of us, have been for long years 'he best and cheeriest of brain companions, joined to his exquisite knack of taking color from the style of the authors he thus commemorates, makes of these mock epistles the "most excellent fooling" of its kind. Quite irresistible is the communication of Mrs. Proudie, wife of the well bullied Bishop of Barchester Towers, to her gossip Emily Quiverful, detailing her shocking experience with that "brazen-faced, painted daughter of Heth (sixty, if she is a day)," Rebecca, Lady Crawley, née Sharp, who, as an interesting conrert to his Lordship's eloquence, managed to get herself installed as an inmate of the Palace! Not less thrilling is the account furnished by Miss Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey to her friend Miss Eleanor Tilney, of a visit to the country house of a Mr. Rochester, and of the extraordinary conduct of that gentleman's governess, Miss Eyre. Catherine, poor dear, who will be remembered as a sensitive as well as an inquiring spirit in the matter of occult mysteries, heard, after retiring to her bed, odd laughter, and a stealthy step outside her door. "I hurried on my frock and shawl," she writes, "and crept into the

gallery. A strange dark figure was gliding in front of me, stooping at each door; and every time it stooped came a low gurgling noise! Inspired by I know not what desperation of courage, I rushed on the figure and seized it by the neck. It was Miss Eyre, the governess, filling the boots of all the guests with water, which she carried in When she saw me, she gave a scream and threw herself against a door hung with a curtain of Tyrian dye. It yielded, and there poured into the passage a blue cloud of smoke, with a strong and odious smell of cigars, into which (and to what company?) she vanished."

a can.

The experience of Mr. Cecil Tremayne, an officer in Her Majesty's guards, who, after serving "Under Two Flags," performs an act of Homeric valor in the service of Daisy Miller; the revenge taken by Mr. Alan Breck upon Mr. Barry Lyndon, who had ruined him at cards; the artless correspondence between Harold Skimpole, Esq., and the Rev. Charles Honeyman, M.A., respectively in difficulties of a financial nature; the explanation afforded by "Miss Harriet" to M. Guy de Maupassant, of that "recurrent mystery-why Englishmen abroad smell of gutta-percha;" the letters of Clive Newcome to Arthur Pendennis, of Mrs. Gamp to Mrs. Prig, of Mrs. Casaubon to William Ladislaw, of Mr. Allan Quartermain to Sir Henry Curtis, of Christian D. Piscator and of Truthful James to Mr. Bret Harte-all and more as sparkling await the reader to whose gaze this bright kaleidoscope, styled by the author “Essays in Epistolary Parody," has not yet been revealed. (Longmans, G.)—The Critic.

ESSAYS OF AN AMERICANIST,

THESE essays by Prof. Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D., of the chair of archæology and linguistics in the University of Pennsylvania, are very valuable contributions to contemporary thought in various directions. They fall into four divisions-those on ethnologic and archæologic subjects, mythology and folk-lore, graphic systems and literature, and the linguistic. Prof. Brinton holds certain opinions regarding the antiquity of man on this continent that differ widely from those of most of his contemporary anthropologists; and these essays, which form to a certain extent a connected series, set forth these views and the reasons for his convictions. Prof. Brinton believes the native tribes of America to have possessed much poetic feeling, and he recognizes the symbolic character of their mythology. The archæological portions of these essays are especially valuable and timely in their discussion of recent discoveries in America, and their logical conclusions reached from this data by so learned and profound a scholar as Prof. Brinton. (Porter & C. $3.)—Boston Traveller.

The Literary News.

EDITED BY A. H. LEYPOLDT.

AUGUST, 1890.

THE BOOK-PLATE'S PETITION.

BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE TEMPLE.

WHILE Cynic Charles still trimmed the vane
'Twixt Querouaille and Castlemaine,
In days that shocked JOHN EVELYN,
My First Possessor fix'd me in.
In days of Dutchman and of frost,
The narrow sea with James I cross'd,
Returning when once more began
The Age of Saturn and of Anne.
I am a part of all the past;

I knew the GEORGES, first and last;
I have been oft where else was none
Save the great wig of ADDISON;
And seen on shelves beneath me grope
The little eager form of Pope.

I lost the Third that own'd me when
French NOAILLES fled at Dettingen;
The year JAMES WOLFE surpris'd Quebec,
The Fourth in hunting broke his neck;
The day that William Hogarth dy'd,
The Fifth one found me in Cheapside.
This was a Scholar, one of those
Whose Greek is sounder than their hose;
He loved old Books and nappy ale,
So lived at Streatham, next to THRALE.
'Twas there this stain of grease I boast
Was made by Dr. JOHNSON's toast.
(He did it, as I think, for Spite;
My Master called him Jacobite !)
And now that I so long to-day
Have rested post discrimina,

Safe in the brass-wir'd bookcase where
I watch'd the Vicar's whit'ning hair,
Must I these travell'd bones inter
In some Collector's sepulchre ?

Must I be torn from hence and thrown

With frontispiece and colophon?
With vagrant E's and I's and O's,

The spoil of plunder'd Folios?

With scraps and snippets that to ME

Are naught but kitchen company?

Nay, rather, FRIEND, this favor grant me: Tear me at once; but don't transplant me. CHELTENHAM, Sept. 31, 1792. -From Austin Dobson's Poems on Several Occasions."

REALISM.

PROFESSOR ARTHUR SHERBURNE HARDY, in his views on Realism, doesn't altogether agree with Mr. Howells. "No two mirrors," he says, "give back the same reflection; photography itself is not literal reproduction; and the human eye, in its soberest attempts to observe the data, views them through a medium of feeling and emotion, so that the note-books of separate observers of the same fact, or the sketches by separate pencils of the same face, are as different as a landscape under different skies. Far more difficult than the task of the scientific observer is this of the reporter on things incorporeal, whose eye, itself clouded by prejudice, is fixed on motives, feelings

ous.

and ideas-far more difficult and far more danger. But his report is not false to nature, because its elements have not been seen in precisely the combination under which he presents them, and the justification of such a presentation is found in the effect with he produces. For it is man's privilege to teach in a better fashion what nature teaches imperfectly, to so charge his work with the truth of beauty which nature but inadequately suggests that it will not let us go till these are brought home to us. A hundred photographs may be necessary to represent completely the man we know; but the artist is not condemned to so labori ous a process, and can seize and imprison in a single portrait the spirit of those hundred moods whose outward signs are the despair of the camera. One never sees all this. The philosopher, the poet, the moralist, the practical man, will draw up for us different accounts of the same phenomenon without exhausting the facts or their reach. Nature is an ocean from which each fills his tiny cup with what he may. The liberty of the artist is his power of choice. Its exercise charms us because we seem to see in his work a product, not of nature, but of that mind to which we refer nature. To set a bound to this idealizing process is to set bounds to our hopes, our aims and desires. We persist in living in tomorrow, though to-morrow never comes; our desire is for the beauty nature never attains; our aim is the sum of truth whose fragmentary and often contradictory manifestations cannot detain us. To decry the process because it sometimes leads us astray is to decry our noblest instincts." -N. Y. Tribune.

BALZAC.

To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of a suffering woman's heart; but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac's method and results, but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator; his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had "incomparable power" he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydean, the younger Dumas, Angier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Beaudelaire is as some fat, strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs.

Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his Pigault-Lebrun des duchesses is only malicious; he resented the man's exuberant and inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of that sugared vitriol of which he had

the secret.

Taine is a fitter critic of the Comédie humaine than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognized the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession, declares that the Parisiennes of the Comédie are everything they ought to be the true daughters of their "bon gros libertin de père." And while Taine, exulting in his Morneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer-English of course -can find no better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline of la Pean de Chagrin as the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or the other party must be wrong. Which is it? "Qui trompe-t-on ici." Is Taine a better judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It may be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as the Comédie; it is a fact that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the Comédie in its totality; and that is reason good enough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.

THE PRODUCTION OF STANLEY'S "IN DARKEST AFRICA."

AT the dinner given in honor of Mr. H. M. Stanley by Messrs. E. Marston, S. W. Searle, W. J. Rivington, and R. B. Marston, at the Holborn, London, June 26, Mr. E. Marston in the opening speech gave the following interesting information respecting the bringing into being Mr. Stanley's new book:

"You will all admit that Mr. Stanley's recent passage through Darkest Africa was a grand feat. Well, I am inclined to think that the way he wrote his account of that grand feat was not much less remarkable. The work contains, roughly speaking, a thousand pages of forty lines each. On January 25 of this year, not a line of it had been written. Then it was that Mr. Stanley sat down at the Villa Victoria in Cairo with a firm determination that nothing earthly should stop him till he had finished it. In fifty days he completed his self-imposed task, or rather the task which he says I imposed upon him. This means that he not merely wrote out, but he had to think out, twenty pages, say, 8000 words, a day. Gentlemen, if you wish to know what an amount of endurance and perseverance that means, I recommend you to try the experiment yourselves.

It is easy enough to write twenty very long pages a day, for one, two, or three days, but to keep on doing so for fifty days consecutively, without any break or relaxation whatever to speak of, is quite another matter. Now let me glance at the manufacture of these volumes. In view of the enormous amount of public interest felt in this book I see no objection for once to depart from our usual reticence in such matters, and to say that we have orders in the house for, and on Saturday morning we shall despatch, over 16,000 copies besides 6000 of a colonial edition, and other issues.* You know the whole thing had to be rushed through the press, and I assure you it has taxed the resources of Messrs. Clowes' vast establishment for many weeks. To produce this book in the way it has been produced required something more than mere routine work. It required a thoughtful guiding spirit—one who would devote heart and soul to the work, and we cannot feel too grateful to Captain Clowes for the extraordinary devotion and personal attention he has given to the accomplishment of this task. In the printing department the work has found employment for many weeks for 60 compositors, 17 readers, 12 reading boys, and about 200 machine-pressmen and warehousemen. The paper consumed in printing the édition de luxe, the colonial edition, the canvassing edition, and the trade edition weighs 65%1⁄2 tons. This paper, if it had been laid out in single sheets, would have formed a white carpet for Mr. Stanley to have walked upon from the Congo to Zanzibar, or if laid sheets upon sheets it would have formed a tower something like the Tour Eiffel. The type and material used weighed 74 tons, and there were 2,500,000 types used in each of the above editions. Eighteen steam printing machines and ten hand presses consumed 111⁄2 tons of printing ink. Then as to the binding, we had to get bound in a fortnight, in all, about 40,000 volumes. These have given employment to over 500 men and 600 women. About 4500 yards or nearly 21⁄2 miles of binders' cloth were consumed on these editions. Now, as there have been produced simultaneously in America and on the Continent about ten other editions, I think I should not be far out in stating that it would be quite within the mark to multiply all the figures I have mentioned by 7 or 8. Taking the latter estimate, Mr. Stanley may comfort himself with the reflection that during the last four months his fifty days' labor of brain and pen have given employment to an army of probably seven thousand men and at least as many women and girls, and probably the aggregate weight of all the editions which will be issued simultaneously on Saturday will exceed three

hundred tons."

* [The first edition of Charles Scribner's Sons' edition was 65,000 copies, which is followed by another large edition.-ED. L. N.

ARTISTIC, MUSICAL, DRAMATIC. MASON, E. F. The Othello of Tommaso Salvini a study. Putnam. por., sq. 8° $1. PARSONS, ALBERT ROSS. Parsifal: the finding of Christ through art; or, Richard Wagner as theologian. Putnam. 8° $1.

The main text of this work was delivered in the form of a lecture before the Lecture Chapter of the Guild of All Souls Church (Episcopal), New York City, Sunday, May 19, 1889, by invitation of the Guild, through the Rev. R. Heber Newton, rector of the parish.

"Wagner has been presented to us in many shapes by his friends and opponents; here he is shown as a theologian, and Mr. Parsons' ingenuity and analysis will no doubt be appreciated by a class to whom Wagner's music makes but a slight appeal. Mr. Parsons considers Wagner as a religieuse, and after showing that the composer was, up to middle life, hardly more than a ' pagan,' he shows that through the studies undertaken for the constructing of his music dramas, and especially Parsifal,' Wagner became a Christian. It is true he was a 'liberal' Christian, so liberal that it might have been difficult for him to procure the right of communion to an Evangelical Church, but he declared himself to have found Christ,' and the earnest and moving words used by Mr. Parsons seem entirely justified. It is altogether a very suggestive and interesting record."-Phil adelphia Evening Telegraph.

his influence that the clause prohibiting slavery was introduced into the constitution, and others relating to religion and education. Many interesting sketches are given of men prominent in the early days of the Territory and State.

LITTLE, Rev. H. W. H. M. Stanley: his life, works, and explorations. Lippincott. 8° $3.

MAGAZINE ARTICLES.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Allen. Lippincott's.
Major-Gen. Ebenezer Stevens. Mrs. Lamb. Mag. Amer.
History.

Rudolph Koenig. (Por.) Stevens. Pop. Science.

DESCRIPTION, TRAVEL, ETC.

CARSTENSEN, A. R. Two summers in Greenland: an artist's adventures among ice and islands in fjords and mountains. Lippincott. 8° $2.50.

DUNCAN, SARAH JEANNETTE. A social departure: how Orthodocia and I went round the world by ourselves; il. by F. H. Townsend. Appleton. il. 12° $1.75.

JUNKER. W. Travels in Africa; from the German by Prof. Keane. Lippincott. 8° $5. STANLEY, H. M. In darkest Africa; or, the quest, rescue, and retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. Scribner. 2 v., 8°, subs., $7.50.

This, the latest history of exploration in Africa, is a terrible story of human suffering and endurance and self-sacrifice. Besides the interesting details of the inception of the expedition in London in 1886 to its arrival in Africa and its journey up the Congo to its confluence with the Aruwimi, where Stanley proposed to make his depot and base of supplies, there are a perfect wealth of adventures. Among the more important incidents are the horrible march through the great forest region along the course of the Aruwimi River, the pitiful experiences of Capt. Nelson in Starvation Camp, the joyous discovery of the grass lands, the arrival at Albert Nyanza, the return to the forest and the construction of Fort Bodo, the second journey to the lake and the meeting with Emin, and finally the march back to Banalya in search of the missing rear column, the story of whose unfortunate fate concludes the first volume. The second volume contains a study of Emin Pasha and additional researches and adventures. VINCENT, FRANK. In and out of Central America, and other sketches and studies of travel. Appleton. por. map. and il. 12° $2.

MAGAZINE ARTICLES.
Search for a Lost Building. Davis. Atlantic.
Blackwood's (July).

Treasures of the Yosemite.* Muir. Century.
Perils and Romance of Whaling.* Kobbé. Century.
Country Life in Ireland. Mahaffy. Chautauquan.
Summer Outing in New York. Barnard, Chautauquan.
Old Guilds of Flanders.* Pierson. Cosmopolitan.
Russian Prisons: The Simple Truth. Lanin. Fort. Re-
view (July).

England and Germany in Africa. Johnston; Cameron :
Beckett. Fort. Review (July).

Impressions of Berlin.* Child. Harper's.