Twenty pretty stories with little girls for heroines. They are natural children, and the story-teller has pleasing fancies about them while she is telling the trifling incidents of their adventures. The good taste and refined feeling of the book make it somewhat exceptional, and the simple manner in which the children are shown either helping or being helped marks the wholesomeness of the tales. - The Chronicles of Faeryland, Fantastic Tales for Old and Young, by Fergus Hume. Illustrated by M. Dunlop. (Lippincott.) Mr. Hume uses his inventive power more effectively here than in his grown-up stories, for his skill is in the narrating of adventures without too close regard for their logic or their probability, and these fairy tales are a free handling of the familiar conventions. They have a zest about them which is quite attractive. No Heroes, by Blanche Willis Howard. (Houghton.) A bright story of generous self-sacrifice in a boy, and so couched in the natural language of boyhood, half formed, fun concealing feeling, and nature concerning herself more with the block than the sculpture, that a manly boy will read it without discomfort, and take to heart a lesson which he might refuse to commit to memory. The Sunny Days of Youth, a Book for Boys and Young Men, by the Author of How to be Happy Though Married. (Scribners.) The writer, in his accustomed colloquial and informal fashion, gives very sound advice or warning on a great variety of matters relating to both major and minor morals. Even careless or unliterate youth will probably find the book easily readable, as its admonitions are plentifully illustrated by anecdotes, always apposite, and sometimes new, or as good as new.

Textbooks. From Henry Holt & Co. we have four textbooks for French classes, each prepared by an instructor of American youth. The first, except for the type and the publishers' imprint, has an air entirely French, as its title-page will show : Histoire de la Littérature Française, par Alcée Fortier, Professeur à l'Université Tulane de la Louisiane. In the language of the works with which it deals, it enumerates and briefly characterizes the principal authors and books in the whole course of the history of France," ce grand pays," as the writer declares with pardonable zeal,

"qui s'appela la Gaule de Vercengétorix, et qui est maintenant la France républicaine." Of the other books it is necessary only to say that they have been carefully equipped with all devices to aid the learner. Their titles are Michel Strogoff, par Jules Verne, abridged and edited, with Notes, by Edwin Seelye Lewis (Princeton); Selections from Victor Hugo, Prose and Verse, edited, with Introduction and Notes, by F. M. Warren (Adelbert College); and Contes de Daudet (including La Belle-Nivernaise), edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Indices, by A. Guyot Cameron (Yale). — Livre de Lecture et de Conversation, by C. Fontaine. (Heath.) A judicious mingling, entirely in French, of simple readings, questions, and drill in the forms of language, especially the verbs. It is the author's belief that the expression of Goethe regarding the Greeks as his favorite writers may well be modified by learners of the French tongue into "les verbes, les verbes, et toujours les verbes." But it is not forgotten, as teachers sometimes forget, that conjugations and language are distinct things; and the writer's practical purpose is to bring them vitally together. In Heath's Modern Language Series a new number is Genin's Le Petit Tailleur Bonton, edited, with Notes, Vocabulary, and Appendices, by W. S. Lyon. The pupil is lifted bodily over every stone in the way. In the same series is Gustav Freytag's Der Rittmeister von Alt-Rosen, edited by J. T. Hatfield. The book is judiciously equipped with historical apparatus and a reasonable body of notes. A somewhat novel venture is Petite Histoire de la Littérature Française depuis les Origines jusqu'à nos Jours, par Delphine Duval, Professor of French in Smith College. (Heath.) Here the somewhat dubious introduction of the pupil to the history of literature by means of a manual, illustrated sparingly by examples, at least in verse, is justified by the fact that the pupil is at the same time enjoying practice in the language. Old English Ballads, selected and edited by Francis B. Gum(Ginn.) In the interesting and valuable introduction to this well-selected and carefully-edited volume of ballads, Professor Gummere discusses thoroughly the question of their origin. He concludes in favor of a very sensible sort of "communal" authorship. Incidentally, he sug

mere.

gests the deep human interest and meaning of these "survivals of a vanished world of poetry." In doing so, however, he seems to disparage what he inadequately calls the "poetry of the schools." But perhaps this is due only to his effort to gain a wider hearing for that poetry which is distinguished by its lack of personal sentiment and reflection, and by a peculiar charm of spontaneity.

Social Philosophy. The Cosmopolis City Club, by Rev. Washington Gladden. (The Century Co.) Cosmopolis is a city of Utopia, though its club and the doings thereof pertain wholly to our own land. This book,

which readers of the Century Magazine will recall, tells of the talks and achievements of an imaginary group of men who believed with Andrew D. White that "the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom, the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt." Believing as they did, these men banded themselves together to improve the affairs of their own city; and this they accomplished, establishing in the end a new and reformed city charter. Though in the form of fiction, the book describes what might perfectly well be, indeed in several cities has been, fact.

At the Inn of IT is rather amusing to con

the Bear.

trast the Lucerne Schweizerhof or the Roman Quirinal of to-day with a hotel where princes, cardinals, and kings put up two hundred years ago. Even allowing that this has fallen away from its high estate, one can still see that the nineteenth century may well pride itself on increased decency and amenities, not to speak of luxuries; though, to tell the truth, perhaps our forefathers had more luxuries than comforts in life. People who quaffed their wine from filmy old Murano and cups wrought by roistering Benvenuto Cellini were not badly off as to the aesthetics, but any one who will look up the ancient Albergo dell' Orso may have a hint of what their traveling accommodations were.

Leaving behind those modern streets with their most modern titles which give Mr. Augustus Hare such exquisite pain, one still finds a quarter of Rome where the names have a smack of the olden time, and the Way of the Golden Lily," the alleys "of the Lute" and "the Dove," thrill one with suggestions of a more picturesque age than ours. An Italian author of to-day compares the narrow, dark Via dell' Orso, which leads from the Torre della Scimmia (Hilda's tower) to the Tiber, to the dry bed of a once rapid, rushing river. It was a great artery of the city; now it is a deserted by way. In ancient times, this being a fashionable quarter, and the Inn of the Bear

attracting all great and distinguished travelers, the hirers of sedan chairs, and later on of coaches and saddle horses, had established themselves in this street. An inferior rival of the Bear, the Inn of the Lion, long ago disappeared, was likewise in this street, kept by the famous beauty Vanozza Cattanei (painted in the Vatican, by Pinturicchio, as the Virgin, with her papal lover at her feet), the mistress of Alexander VI., and the mother of Cæsar and Lucrezia Borgia. In a year of scarcity, she and her second husband, Carlo Canale, were allowed to sell their wine free of the general tax, thereby driving a good traffic in the lower rooms of the Lion.

At the point where the street converges with Via Tor di Nona stands our venerable hostelry. Readers of Marion Crawford will remember that it was at this place Anastase Gouache was thrown down by the prince's carriage. Whether the inn gave its name to the street, or the street to the inn, is lost in the night of time.

It was a brilliantly sunshiny, or, as we who love the old city say, a real Roman day, when I hunted out the spot. As I came to it, the end house of Via dell' Orso, I craned my neck up to see what antique traces there might be left, but was rewarded only by an expanse of dull red wall with a narrow moulding at its top. At the front, however, is a big, arched doorway leading into a large vaulted ground room which is used as a

I was joined by a group of sympathetic idlers, who gazed up at the house with new respect, but lent me the larger share of curious attention. On the Tor di Nona side is the present entrance, a small door with a broken lamp overhead lettered "Albergo dell' Orso;" for through the vicissitudes of seven centuries it has been, and remains, an inn. On the second floor, to the left, is a charmingly quaint little arched window with columns and fretwork which, though stuccoed over, preserve their old outlines, like a tiny crest on a visiting-card, to vouch for ancient lineage. From the narrow street door two flights of dingy steps, on opposite sides of the brick-paved entry, lead to a long room, likewise brick-paved, which serves as the hotel office. a young woman had all the crockery from the chambers set out in startling array, and the whole place seemed a vortex of virtuous attempts to clean up. Expressing my wish to see the rooms in which Dante, Machiavelli, and Montaigne lodged, I was courteously handed over to mine host and his dame, two fat, slatternly people who took great pride in showing their house.

There

The bedrooms are ludicrously small, reminding one of ship dimensions, and are now papered with very dashing yellows and blues; but, imbedded in the walls of several rooms, mine host showed the ancient stone arches of the loggia which once formed the front of the house. In the wee chamber with the bizarre window, the woman announced triumphantly, "Here it was Dante slept when he came to Rome as ambassador of the Argentine Republic," -a slip smartly snubbed by her spouse, who dilated on the antiquity of everything, and said that as there was "not another window like it in the world," it had been copied for the museum in Via Capo le Case. The old houses jutting on the Tiber having been razed to make way for the new embankment, the window commands an extensive view of the tawny river, the Castle of S. Angelo, the bridge,

and the "low hills to westward ;" but how was it all when the proud young ambassador came to Pope Boniface, nearly six centuries ago? The gentle poet face, still rounded with hope and tender dreaming, as his friend Giotto painted it, was not hardened into gloomy sternness by bitter exile and the salt flavor of the stranger's bread. On the eve of this fourth embassy, when it was proposed in the Florentine Council that he should go as the head of the deputation, he cried, with a youthful arrogance made pathetic by the irony of after events, "But if I go, who will stay? If I stay, who will go?" And it was during this same Roman stay (protracted, it is said, by the Pope's machinations) that he waked to find himself a proscribed outcast from beloved Florence. Truly, then, if tradition can be trusted, this little room saw the poet's awakening to the stern realities of life and changed fortunes; it was here that Clotho began to twine in the darker threads of a web which was soon to have no bright ones, and the spot is consecrated by a poet's chrism of suffering.

Outside in the ever young sunlight the passing throng is crowding as eagerly over the Ponte S. Angelo as in the jubilee year when Dante saw its double current of humanity. (Inferno xviii. 29.)

How a great personality dwarfs all the lesser shades! Machiavelli and Montaigne have grown flimsy and unsubstantial to me, here, in the spell of a greater memory, a more breathing, pulsating life and work. Popes have largely lost their power, the greatness of the bustling Florentine republic is like a tale that is told, but the young generations, feeling the throb of a quickbeating heart, yet cry in sympathetic, loving reverence," Onorate l'altissimo poeta!" Now and again we fail sadly tory for to improve the people we are making it our business in life to improve, by rating them too low. I gave myself conscientiously to amusing a group of street boys with table games for several months before I discovered them to be worthy of much better things. Then the discovery came by the merest accident.

Natural His

Street Boys.

The boys were twelve and thirteen years of age. There were seven of them, and they came to my room once a week. Their ignorance of the commonest facts of country life (I have heard a squirrel called a young monkey) led me one night to show them a

dusty natural-history collection I had made when a very small boy. Instantly it was to them as if they were in a fairy palace. The specimens (mainly insects and birds' eggs) were battered, worm-eaten, and discolored; but my boys' eyes were full of wonder, and reverence was in the touch of their hands. They were touched with a new enthusiasm that boded much good. I saw that I should have to rack my brains no more for amusements; that our meetings were at last to answer a real purpose.

The collection alone, petty as it was, held the attention of the boys for several nights. Then, as it was winter, I tried to tide the precious interest over to spring by planting seeds in sawdust and sand, and getting them to do the same. Early in March, I was able to show tree buds and catkins as trophies of walks in the country, and a little later, live frogs, turtles, and snakes. As soon as birdnesting time arrived, it was easy to make a striking display every week. On occasional Saturdays I took the boys into the country, and there they became infected with the eggcollecting fever.

"Other things being equal," says good Dr. John Brown, "a boy who goes birdnesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their colors and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an exactness, and a permanency which only youth and a quick pulse and fresh blood and spirits combined can achieve, a boy who teaches himself

collector to talk about his specimens, with the hope that some time a series of lectures might be possible. I also secured such simple books of ornithology, oölogy, and entomology as would give us significant facts about our own specimens. This textbook study served fairly well so far as the boys were concerned, but I am not a scientist myself, and could put no zest into the work. I knew it could not last, for their enthusiasm, in the long run, was going to depend on mine. I love Thoreau and I love Burroughs and all the rest of the outdoor fraternity. I longed to share my pleasure in them with the boys, but lacked the moral courage to make so risky an experiment. Finally I remembered the charming bird biographies of Olive Thorne Miller, and ventured on them. It was a happy venture. This so far emboldened me that I read them, in quick succession, parts of Bradford Torrey, Bolles, Abbott, Burroughs, and even Thoreau. Of these, Burroughs, I think, was the favorite. That the finer shades of thought or the strictly literary qualities of these writings were apparent to the boys I do not for a moment affirm. Of course I had to choose chapters wisely, and avoid altogether, or simplify, as I read along, unfamiliar words and references; but the salient ideas were taken in, and the fresh out-of-door flavor was appreciated.

This past summer, the study and collecting have gone on very much as in the year before, except that the nature-love is now "inside the skin." This it is that makes me glad. The boys no longer wait for me to take the initiative. They take electric-car rides into the country by themselves, when they can raise dimes. When there are no dimes, they walk out through dismal city streets to such country as is to be found at the end of two or three miles, — tame enough, as most of us know.

These boys are forever past calling every flower a daisy, every bird a robin, every snake a rattlesnake, every insect a bee, and every tree an "ellum," as they did in the beginning. That is something. They have learned to observe; whereas at first they discerned nothing, their young eyes are now sharper than my own.

They have a rudimentary appreciation of the beauties of atmosphere and color. The theory of evolution still puzzles them. "Once, you know, a monkey, he fell asleep,

an' after a long time he woke up an' found he was a man," fairly expresses their understanding of it; but they have acquired a sense of orderly development (the plant from the seed, the flower from the bud, the butterfly from the worm), and along with this a feeling of reverence for the Power at work in the world about them.

These are small things, perhaps, and these small things may not visibly modify the lives of my boys. But the effort out of which they come may be worth while, notwithstanding.

Those of us who have faith that no good influence, however weak, is vain, as well as those of us who are Wordsworthians enough to believe in the special ethical value of a love of nature, will feel it is really no small thing for the child of a city slum to grow to manhood with such a love within his soul. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." In these hours of rollicking country research are "life and food for future years."

Cuban and

-The first election to the French Academician. Academy during the present year took place in February. It brought a writer of sonnets-and of only a single volume at that into the chair left vacant by the death of Mazade, who was for fifty years the weigher of European politics in the Revue des Deux Mondes. It was a difficult task for newspaper correspondents, who had not followed closely the inner mysteries of recent French literature, to render account of the lucky poet. Edmund Gosse, in the Contemporary Review, has finally enlightened English and American readers as to the poetic quality of M. José Maria de Heredia. But who shall succeed in tempering the refreshing legend which the daily press had "grown" about his name?

The highest point of misinformation was reached, perhaps, by the Paris correspondent of the London Daily News, who, I believe, also writes the lively and inaccurate Paris notes for Mr. Labouchère's Truth. According to this version of his life, M. de Heredia is a mulatto of Cuba, a former minister of the French state, and has been mixed up with a defunct gambling club of Paris. The last accusation was the consequence of an incorrect reading of names in a recent baccarat scandal ventilated by the French courts. The confusion with M. Severiano de Heredia, the French politician,

is probably due to the fact that Vapereau, in his latest edition of the Dictionnaire Universel des Contemporains, speaks of no other bearing the family name. The epithet "mulatto " was doubtless due to a defective logic working on the statement that the Academy had not actually elected a foreigner to its very French bosom, since the poet is of mixed blood.

In the vivid truth of things, José Maria de Heredia was born in Cuba, of a mother whose grandfather was a member of the parliament of Normandy under the old régime in France. By his father he descends from the proudest blood of the early Spanish conquistadores, a fact that has inspired one of his most stirring sonnets, To the Founder of a City :

"Toi qui fondas, orgueil du sang dont je naquis,

Dans la mer Caraïbe une Carthage neuve." His first literary work, when he was scarcely more than a boy, at the end of his studies in the École des Chartes, was a careful edition and translation of some of the chronicles which narrate the great deeds of his ancestors. They have always had the same effect upon his soul that the reading of Chapman's Homer had on Keats, making him feel like "stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien."

Of course, the Spanish-American Frenchman could never have made the Englishman's mistake of placing Cortez where Balboa stood. But he, too, has traveled to good purpose and sonnets "round many western islands,"

"Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold." His latest addition to the still unwrought literary mine of this American heroic age is a deliciously painstaking translation into French of the memoirs of the "nun Alferez," who, in man's attire, overran all that was then known of America; playing high, drinking deep, and stabbing to right and left as valiantly as any hero of them all.

In 1870, M. de Heredia wished to enlist in the service of his mother's country; but, in spite of the fearful need of defenders, his near-sightedness caused his rejection. He did not finally secure his naturalization as a French citizen until the publication of his sonnets, gathered into a small volume, had made the literary sensation of a season