labeled. The latest books of Mr. Stockton1 and Mr. Harris2 have been not a little disappointing, though less disappointing than this story of Mr. Page's. In his own vein of stately and gentle sentiment, the vein, for example, of The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock, Mr. Page has had few equals. Gordon Keith is labored, sensational, and dull, and can hardly hope for more than the momentary attention due an experiment in a new field by a master in an old one. It cannot be said that the experiment has been successful, unless from the commercial point of view.

Several other new books by Southern writers are likely to achieve something more than a success of commercialism or of curiosity. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come has been made familiar to many readers through its serial publication. According to the prevailing fashion, and a good old fashion it is, the tale begins with the boyhood of the hero. The first half of it, indeed, constitutes an excellent boy's story. The boy himself is worth knowing, and the account of his adventures is given simply and directly, with sympathy, yet without sentimentalism. There is much description in the early chapters, as is natural, for the boy is at that time only a part of the wilder

thick as snow-dust, it filled valley, chasm, and ravine with mystery and silence up to the dark jutting points and dark wav ing lines of range after range that looked like breakers, surged up by some strange new law from an under- sea of foam; motionless, it swept down the valleys, poured swift torrents through high gaps in the hills, and one long noiseless cataract over a lesser range - all silent, all motionless, like a great white sea stilled in the fury of a storm."

The story of the boy's birth and childhood, of his budding ambitions, of his sturdy growth and steady rise in the face of great difficulties, is the oldest story in the world, but Mr. Fox has made it new again. With his arrival at the threshold of manhood comes the outbreak of the Rebellion, and the comparative abeyance of the personal motive. of the personal motive. The war episodes are less carefully subordinated to the human theme than they were, not long ago, in Mr. Cable's Cavalier, or in Miss Roseboro's Joyous Heart. There are moments when the reader misgives that he has been betrayed once more into perusing a mere historical novel. Fortunately General Grant and the others do eventually retreat into the background, leaving the hero to emerge once more into private life and significance. There is no cause for wonder in the fact that most Southern stories seem fated to deal, directly or indirectly, with the civil war. Only when, as in the recent case of The Vagabond,* the thing is done feebly and sensationally, is one tempted to wish that the old tune of the Blue and the Gray might cease to reverberate under the quiet porticoes of fiction.

Among Southern novelists Mr. Allen is of the few who have not based their

3 The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. By JOHN FOX, Jr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1903.

4 The Vagabond. By FREDERICK PALMER. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1903.

work upon the memory of past belligerence. His new story,1 like its predecessors, is laid in modern Kentucky. The present commentator is embarrassed in giving his opinion of it by the fact that with regard to a former product of the author's craft he stood in a perhaps calculably trifling minority. For A Kentucky Cardinal he had sincere admiration, but he must confess frankly that The Choir Invisible seemed to him not only artificial, but unwholesome. There is a literature of immorality which we know how to take; it bears its character upon its forehead. Not seldom it is able to command, at least, the respect due to outspoken virility. But a literature of strained idealism tinctured with subtle prurience of the imagination is not even virile; it is certainly not of our

race.

Tom Jones is immoral, let us say, but it is rather among the fine sentiments and boasted pruderies of Paul et Virginie that one finds the imagination grown corrupt and emasculate.

The quality here suggested is less prominent in the present story than it was in The Choir Invisible; but it is not absent. In other respects we find little or no advance made over the earlier work. The heroine of The Mettle of the Pasture is an unqualified prig. The adventuress, who happens to be the grandmother of the heroine, enjoys the distinction, not uncommon among her kind, of being a leopardess. She coils, she glides, she "sits up with lithe grace." When she looked out of a window," she sat down and raised the blind a few inches in order to peep out." When she was angry "she sat fectly still; and in the parlor there ✦ have been heard at intervals the scratching of her finger-nails e wood of her chair." Nothing against the hero except that interesting; perhaps our ' him is compromised by

the Pasture. By JAMES New York: The Macmillan

his devotion to the heroine. Most of the minor characters are of considerable interest; and it is remarkable that, with a main theme so incapable of arousing our concern, there should be much spirited and easy by-play. The Judge, Barbee, Marguerite, the Hardages, are all excellent material for romantic comedy. We are depressed by the duty of holding our faces firm and grave for the sake of a principal motive which we take to be halftragic in intention. We should have so thoroughly enjoyed meeting these good people if their creator had not seen fit to keep certain buskined puppets in the foreground. We cannot fairly demand that every novelist shall be hearty and forthright in matter or manner. To certain tastes there is a charm in the heavy perfume of housed orchids; most of us prefer the growth of the breezy open.

There is no doubt that Mr. Allen possesses, what is by no means common among novelists of this day, a keen sense of the dignity of his art; but, by a natural paradox, this very seriousness of purpose may lead him to attempt work of a kind which is beyond his powers. It is a pity that an assured success in a pure style should be sacrificed for a dreamed-of achievement in the grand style. We may hope that the writer in question will yet produce more in that form of prose idyl which won him an audience.

tors, and sight-seeing, and ought, consequently, to appeal to at least three classes of people. Moreover, one may fairly say that it has wit and taste, though not genius, to recommend it.

Two other books of pleasant humor1 have chanced to come to hand recently through unofficial channels. They were, in fact, like The Lightning Conductor, privately recommended by persons who do not pretend to weigh what they enjoy. We hasten to pass on the knowledge of them to others who may not have chanced to come upon them in the course of the day's journey. They are Irish tales of the old-fashioned, rollicking sort, and comfortingly assure us that there is still a cheerful aspect of Hibernian life. It may be a sign of callousness, but we are glad to know that the Ireland of Miss Barlow and Mr. Moore is, after all, not the only Ireland extant. We have listened with proper sympathy to the somewhat lugubrious chronicles of life among the dwellers in the bog, and we need not now feel guilty at sharing in the merriment which still exists among the squires and the gentry, as it did in the palmy days of Charles Lever and Samuel Lover. Even the peasants, who here figure mainly in the background, appear to be a fairly cheerful, though not pampered class. Most of the stories manage to be horsy, and at the same time to treat profitably of the loves of certain attractive young persons. There is abundance of amusing description and dialogue, and with much that is too subtly humorous to be profitably detached from the context, an occasional scene of broad fun which reminds one of the good old horse-play of Humphry Clinker or Handy Andy:

"There is probably not in the United

1 Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. By E. CE. SOMERVILLE and MARTIN ROSS. London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co. 1903.

Kingdom a worse-planned entrance gate than Robert Trinder's. You come at it obliquely on the side of a crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either side of the driver's legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly better in large red letters at the top of old Robert's note paper than it did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell; following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth. Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty aprons, flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet somewhere in it. My carman leaped from his perch and joined in the chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze around or into a clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert Trinder's voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were coming."

Miss Austen would very likely have discovered neither wit nor taste in this description. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort to be discovered there; one person, at least, must cheerfully confess that he rejoices in it all.

In one of his recently collected Studies in Contemporary Biography,' the Right Honorable James Bryce remarks of that eminent scholar, the late Lord Acton, that "his mastery of the so-called human subjects was unequaled;" and now that Lord Acton is no more, the same thing might fairly be said of Mr. Bryce himself.

If the human subjects be taken to mean the story of man and his doings in the world, of man, that is, in his personal, social, and civic relations, leaving out of sight, on the one hand, his kinship with the dumb animals, and his purely religious instincts and aspirations on the other, there is, I think, no living English writer whose temper is finer or his equipment for such discussion more complete. Certainly there is none whose judgment upon the human subjects we Americans are more bound to respect than the author of the American Commonwealth. No transatlantic observer -not even De Tocqueville, who, for the rest, was more swayed by preconceived ideas and theories, and who wrote of us when we were, nationally speaking, far greener, and less formed than now - has made of our vaunted institutions a study so searching and at the same time so sympathetic; and that the last word upon our baffling case of this great expert should have been a hopeful one is a circumstance that steadies and consoles the simple patriot like the favorable verdict of a great physician at an alarming crisis. "A hundred times in writing this book," says Mr. Bryce in his introductory chapter to the American Commonwealth, "have I been disheartened by the facts I was stating; a hundred times has the recollection of

1 Studies in Contemporary Biography. By JAMES BRYCE. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

“... our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears," as the academic poet of the young republic sang, in one of his own rare moments of strong emotion. Nor does Mr. Bryce appeal to the political theorist only, and to the serene élite of the study. Having had occasion at one time to consult the sole copy of the American Commonwealth in a provincial public library, I found, and was rejoiced to find, upon every page, up to the seven hundredth of the second volume, indisputable proof that the book had been held long and lovingly in the hands of the reading masses.

The twenty odd character-studies brought together in the new volume afford fresh evidence of Mr. Bryce's breadth and acumen as well as of his unusually wide acquaintance among the leading minds of his day. The larger number are likenesses, drawn in strong outline, of men recently living, most of whom were known personally to the writer, and some very intimately known. They were all men of British birth and all but one of English careers. They include statesmen, historians, ecclesiastics, Anglican and Roman, great lights of insular law, like Sir George Jessel and Lord Chancellor Cairnes, one novelist, Anthony Trollope, one philosopher,the "modern stoic" Henry Sidgwick, one purely ethical teacher, Thomas Hill Green, one editor, E. L. Godkin of the New York Nation, one schoolmaster, the singularly loved and lamented Edward Bowen.

Every one of these men might be described in general terms as a humanist.

There is no poet among them, no soldier, no man of science, and no mystic, unless Professor Sidgwick were one. The fact that most of the shorter studies were formal obituaries, first published in some literary weekly, may help, no doubt, to invest the entire volume with a slightly solemn and ceremonial air. Gravity, urbanity, detachment, and a kind of studied catholicity are its prevailing notes. It is as if Mr. Bryce were perpetually reminding himself of the nihil nisi bonum convention; and his very wit, though it cannot be wholly suppressed, is subdued to that tone of suave and almost stealthy irony which befits the "third coach after the hearse." It is thus, for example, that he characterizes Lord Sherbrooke's (Robert Lowe's) assumed gift of prophecy: "People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts used to call him a Cassandra; perhaps forgetting that beside the distinctive feature of Cassandra's prophecies, that nobody believed them, - there was another distinctive feature, namely, that they came true." He illustrates one of the capital qualifications for writing sound history of his own great favorite, John Richard Green, by an allusion to Froude which is unsurpassed for decorum: "A master of style may be a worthless historian. We have instances." And in the course of his exceedingly brilliant analysis of the character and career of Lord Beaconsfield he touches the question of the great Hebrew's veracity with a tenderness which recalls the euphemistic definition evolved by Professor Royce in his work on the World and the Individual; of — "one who deliberately misplaces his ontological predicates."

There are no italics in any of these deprecatory passages, nor do they require any. And I cannot help thinking that there is, after all, a great deal to be said in favor of Mr. Bryce's discreet, reserved, and comparatively ceremonious treatment of illustrious careers lately ended. He cares more for the essence of character than for the accidents of life; and

is it not matter of common and pathetic experience that, in the very first moments after the essence has been detached from its accidents, the proportions of the former are apt to be more clearly seen, than afterward for a long time? So Tennyson, in his great elegy:

"... dearest, now thy brows are cold,
I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old."

Only too soon after the orb is down a mist inevitably arises which may be long in clearing away.

It is not that the author-I might say the artist - of these concise notices ever assumes to anticipate and even less to supersede the accredited biographer. Sometimes indeed, thanks to the astonishingly rapid and efficient working of our improved literary machinery, the regula tion memoir in two ponderous volumes may already have come out; and if so, or if such a work is known to be in preparation, Mr. Bryce is punctilious about referring his readers to it in a footnote. But for once that the beauty of his outline sketch makes us impatient for the more elaborate portrait, we are many times made thankful for a dispensation from the duty of immediately attacking the bigger book. For the fashionable and formidable twelve-hundred-page memoir is in very many cases too soon issued, and in almost all it is twice too long. It is prolix precisely because it is premature; for Time is a wonderful instructor in that art of knowing what to leave out, which Mr. Bryce himself somewhere characterizes as an indispensable requirement of the latter-day historian. Either the incontinent narrative will be delayed by strange episodes, and laden with irrelevant asides, or it will be crammed with trivial details which do but confuse the contours of the principal figure, while admitting the kind of reader who studies the personal items in a Sunday newspaper to a degree of familiarity which would never have been tolerated in the lifetime