countries may be possible in a Greater Britain, but the union of the United States is not a historical parallel. Such a federation might precede, but it could not prevent, the perfect autonomy of Australia or Canada.

"If the colonies are not, in the old phrase," says Mr. Seeley, "possessions of England, then they must be a part of England; and we must adopt this view in earnest. We must cease altogether to say that England is an island off the northwestern coast of Europe; that it has an area of one hundred and twenty thousand square miles and a population of thirty odd millions. We must cease to think that emigrants, when they go to colonies, leave England or are lost to England. We must cease to think that the history of England is the history of the Parliament that sits at Westminster, and that affairs which are not discussed there cannot belong to English history. When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole empire together and call it all England, we shall see that here too is a United States; here too is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion, and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space. We shall see that, though it is held together by strong moral ties, it has little that can be called a constitution, no system that seems capable of resisting any severe shock. But if we are disposed to doubt whether any system can be devised capable of holding together communities so distant from each other, then is the time to recollect the history of the United States of America. For they have such a sys

which we bring to the question, that the problem is insoluble, that no such thing ever was done or ever will be done; it is our misinterpretation of the American Revolution. From that Revolution we infer that all distant colonies, sooner or later, secede from the mother-country. We ought to infer only that they secede when they are held under the old colonial system."

It is entirely possible to follow Mr. Seeley in his most interesting interpretation of modern English history by the great fact of the expansion of England without accepting his apparent conclusion. He complains that Englishmen have misunderstood their own history, and, in the passage last quoted, he sees the remedy in a new and juster view. "We must cease to think," he says; and again, "When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate." But does a nation thus rectify its misunderstanding? No doubt England to-day has its representatives, like Mr. Seeley, who have reached this broader consciousness; and their views may find concrete expression in legislation, which in turn will react upon national thought. Nevertheless, a more philosophical judgment, as we think, takes this persistent misunderstanding as radical and fundamental, itself an index to national limitations. If for two hundred years England has thus been expanding, and needs to be told of it at last by a Cambridge professor, the doubt remains if there are not conditions of nationality, overlooked in the survey, which defeat the prediction of a vast English union. Certain it is that the United States as a nation has attained the consciousness of an organism through means which directly antagonize the assumptions of Mr. Seeley. The war for independence marked the beginning of this consciousness, but it was not until the close of the second war with England that this country really cut loose from Europe. It was not until it had swung out of the great

current of European life that it bore on its way with anything like a distinct purpose. Independence and union have been closely bound with continental integrity, and the highest expression of national life in free political institutions, self-control, art, and religion is the slow product of this self-poised condition. The recent action of Australia is a slight intimation of the same truth. The land held by a people is a far more potent factor in nationality than Mr. Seeley seems to suspect.

Yet there may be a prophetic view of national life which takes too much heed to the relation of the people to the land. The very alluring survey by Mr. Zincke, to which we have once before referred, reminds one a little of the speculations which Franklin used with so much skill when encouraging his countrymen in the establishment of a separate government. Mr. Zincke forecasts the English-speaking population of the globe in successive quarter centuries, upon the basis of the increase during the past hundred years, and finds that, with a total of ninety-three millions in 1880, there will be a thousand millions in 1980. The progression of the United States population alone will be at the rate of doubling itself every twenty-five years; so that, with fifty millions to-day, there will be eight hundred millions a century hence.

With these vast figures, and with the North American continent, Australia, South Africa, and an etcetera for a field upon which to marshal them, he sketches a civilization which is most flattering to one's English pride, and more than that to our American sense; for he rests this mighty civil virtue which is to be upon the American idea that every man shall own his farm. Mr. Seeley shows how England has ceased to be an agricultural country, and has become a com

1 The Plough and the Dollar; or, The Englishry of a Century Hence. By F. BARHAM ZINCKE. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. 1883.

mercial one. Mr. Zincke turns his back on England, apparently, and finds in the agricultural basis of Western civilization the promise of a stupendous future. There is, in his speculations, as in those of many political philosophers to-day, a certain dream of a Paradise Regained rather than of a new Jerusalem. It is impossible to read his glowing pamphlet without a kindling at one's heart; yet when it is laid aside, and one sits down to reason the matter out from the facts of present civilization, the outlook is not so simple and majestic. There are certain stubborn elements of society in our American life which refuse to yield to the seductions of Mr. Zincke's prophecy. There are, too, the facts of great cities, of factories, of corporations, of the gravitation of wealth and land itself into the hands of a few, even in America, which come in to disturb the equation. For all that, it is an interesting sign of the times that the redemption of the world's surface should play so important a part in speculation; that land and its tenure should be the one subject to which men recur in their political thought. Mr. Seeley's great federation and Mr. Zincke's colossal Englishry may be dreams, but they are not idle ones, for they both throw light on the tendencies of history, and have a large value for American students. They have an excellent use also in enlarging the very conceptions of historical study, and we cannot withhold the concluding passage of Mr. Seeley's book as bearing upon this point.

"I am often told by those who, like myself, study the question how history should be taught, Oh, you must, before all things, make it interesting! I agree with them in a certain sense, but I give a different sense to the word interesting, a sense which after all is the original and proper one. By interesting they mean romantic, poetical, surprising; I do not try to make history interesting in this sense, because I have found that

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it cannot be done without adulterating history and mixing it with falsehood. But the word interesting does not properly mean romantic. That is interest ing in the proper sense which affects our interests, which closely concerns us and is deeply important to us. I have tried to show you that the history of modern England from the beginning of the eighteenth century is interesting in this

sense, because it is pregnant with great results, which will affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the future greatness of our country. Make history interesting, indeed! I cannot make history more interesting than it is, except by falsifying it. And therefore, when I meet a person who does not find history interesting, it does not occur to me to alter history; I try to alter him."

If any one asks, with a slow shake of the head, how Mr. Crawford can turn out long stories in such rapid succession, the simplest answer is the most conclusive he has stories to tell. Any one with a head for figures can reckon how many working hours would be required for the mechanical labor of writing To Leeward,' his latest novel in book form; and the calculation would probably show how much time Mr. Crawford gave to one novel. We know nothing whatever of Mr. Crawford's habits of work; we judge simply from the book itself that it was written currente calamo, and it is this free, swift movement which gives a special charm to Mr. Crawford's writing. When one really has a story to tell, and has the story-teller's power of marching straight to the conclusion, his capacity to produce novels must practically be limited only by plain, mechanical conditions.

To Leeward is a story of the lives chiefly of four people of marked individuality, who act upon each other directly, under conditions which lead to a tragical conclusion. The lives of the characters are sketched with boldness; their actions spring from motives clearly apparent, and the issue is logical. There is no exceeding subtlety of thought in 1 To Leeward. By F. MARION CRAWFORD. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1884.

the book; the passions are the elemental ones of love, hate, jealousy, and the moral lies deep in the very picture of life which is presented. Leonora Carnethy, daughter of an English father and Russian mother, tossed from the conventional morality of the father to the unreasoning superstition of the mother, lapses into a vague state of nihilistic irresponsibility, and while wearied with the perpetual conflict of ideas accepts as a possible refuge the love of an Italian marchese, Marcantonio Carantoni. Marcantonio loves her calmly and faithfully, but in making her his wife has been compelled to go counter to the wishes of his sister, Madame de Charleroi. The honeymoon passes, leaving Leonora dissatisfied with herself rather than with her husband, who is unexceptionable; and now comes forward upon the stage Julius Batiscombe, an English journalist and author, whose shadow fell upon the first pages of the history, since he was in the doorway looking on when Marcantonio offered himself to Leonora.

The character of Batiscombe is well conceived. He is a man who cannot help falling in love with women; who sees perfectly well beforehand to what issue his infatuation tends, and takes measures to protect himself by laying

his reputation before him and looking at it sharply, then running away from the temptation, and, when overtaken by the tempter in an apparently accidental fashion, accepting as inevitable the fate which he has not avoided. Such a man, overpowered by his passion, and finding all circumstances, even to the unsuspecting hospitality of the husband, favorable to his designs, goes with the current, though he knows it will bring him on the rocks. Leonora, fascinated by him, drifts with him; and one sees them both, at first slowly, then more rapidly, yielding to the tide of their passions. Diana, Madame de Charleroi, is one of the women whom Batiscombe had once vainly loved, and, discovering what the blind husband has not seen, she at first warns Batiscombe, and then her brother. Marcantonio does not now suspect his wife, for Diana has carefully shielded her; but the revelations of a spying servant open his eyes, and he is at once on the alert, casting an apparently impassable net about his wife. She discovers an opening in the mesh, makes her escape, joins Batiscombe, and flees with him. Thereupon the husband, mad with rage, becomes actually insane, and is watched over by his sister; but he, too, eluding the guard, goes straight, with a maniac's cunning, to the place where the lovers are passing their days, comes upon them, shoots at the man, and kills his wife, who throws herself in the way. The man escapes death. "He has the mark of a bullet in his throat, Marcantonio's second shot, that was so nearly fatal to him. He stood aside from the world for a while, and lived a year or two among the monks of Subiaco; he manifested some devotion for her sake who had died for him. And now he is writing novels, again, and smoking cigarettes between the phrases, to help his ideas and to stimulate his imagination."

Such is a bare outline of a story which owes its power to the author's clear per

ception of what results when two lives drift. There is scarcely a passage in the history where one does not feel that either man or woman could have arrested the fatal movement. It was the absence of will to check an evil course, the gathering volume of passion, which finally swept them away; and it is in the expectation of some deus ex machina that the reader hurries breathlessly forward, until he discovers how relentless is human passion and self-will. Crawford trusts mainly to the actions of his characters. Yet once, in a striking passage, he lifts the veil from the inner consciousness of the woman. She has thrown herself into this new relation vehemently; she has drunk of the cup of pleasure with a full draught, and now finds the lees at the bottom.

Mr.

"And so it came to pass that after a little time the old tax-gatherer, Remorse, began to put Leonora in distress for his dues; and she was forced to pay them, or have no peace. He came in the gray of the morning, when she was not yet prepared, and he sat by her head, and oppressed it with heaviness and the leaden cowl of sorrow; and each day she counted the minutes until he was gone, each day they were more."

and

It cannot be said that the author has succeeded in making Batiscombe as fascinating to the reader as he would have us believe him to have been to Leonora. Yet this may be due to Mr. Crawford's intention of dealing with facts rather than with impressions. To have dwelt upon the nature of Batiscombe's influence over Leonora might easily have led him into the perils of an emotional novel. Instead of that, he has told the tale of human sin and misery as one might record a history. The book is as outspoken as the ten commandments, and it is to the lasting praise of this ar tist that he has treated the whole theme in so direct and objective a manner. Here is no innuendo, or mincing hesita tion, or heating concealment. The reader

sees nothing which the whole world might not have seen; he is invited to no secret interview with illicit love; and when he has laid the book aside, there remains in his mind the memory of a

great wrong, a swift punishment; he bestows his pity and scorn in the right quarters, and he perceives that the author is one with him in the judgment which he passes.

ONE realizes only with great difficulty that the recovery of Greek art in sculpture is practically an achievement of this century. The bas-reliefs of the Campo Santo that awakened the genius of Niccola Pisano, the marbles and gems that Donatello and Brunelleschi unearthed at Rome, and nearly all the treasures that the ancient baths and villas yielded, during the Renaissance, to blend with other powerful influences in shaping a great age were feeble and scanty in comparison with the precious finds of our time, that now fill the metropolitan museums. In fact, it needs a book like Mrs. Mitchell's,1 grouping and correlating the superabundant material of the separate monographs on Mycena, Olympia, Pergamon, Assos, and the like, to convince us by a single wide survey of the field that one of the famous exploits of this century, and of our generation in it, is in a region so remote from materialism. The expansion of our knowledge in respect to the past of our race has, in some semi-barbarous lands like Asia Minor, been more rapid than the spread of our civilization. Enough has already been discovered to prove that the history of Greek culture, from its diffusion under Alexander to its decadence under the Cæsars, has been grossly misconceived, and must be rewritten, just as was the case with Roman provincial history in the north. In the latter instance, our gain has been

1 A History of Ancient Sculpture. By Lucy M. MITCHELL. With numerous illustrations,

in the knowledge of institutions; in the former, it seems likely to be in that of

art.

So much is indicated, at least, by our present information as summarized in these chapters on the Hellenistic age; for, in so brief a notice as this must be, it is necessary to pass over at once the account of oriental art, of the sources of Greek art, and of the nobler Parthenon period, as having been from time to time treated of in our pages. The hints afforded by the Pergamon marbles, for example, are perhaps more interesting than either the fuller records of the previous century, or the scantier monuments of prehistoric Chaldee; certainly this is the case for such as have a penchant for imagining history by the help of possible inferences and contingent analogies. The development of the Greek genius in sculpture, after it had passed its first maturity in Phidias and his immediate successors, apparently presented the same characteristic signs as are shown in other modes of artistic expression in other nations. A reasoned conception of the ends and means, a trained appreciation of form, a complete mastery of technique, were inherited by the sculptors of Pergamon. The purpose being fixed and the tools perfected, no originality was allowed them except in style; and consequently we see in their work, as in the last dramas of Shakespeare, or in the creations of Browning including six plates in phototype. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1883.